'Oumuamua Finally Explained Using a Brilliant Analysis

back in 2017 these scientists using so-called pan stars which was a fast response telescope used to detect certain objects like comets and asteroids detected this unusual object known today as umuamua and years later we're still trying to figure out what exactly this was how a wonderful person today we might actually finally have a solution a very sound scientific solution that does not involve aliens but before i start i actually wanted to briefly mention why we had this controversy and this unusual debate about the origins of this object and without going into details about the object itself the only reasonable explanation i see to all of this is well unfortunately for the lack of better words scientific ego the idea of wanting to be that one scientist discovering something absolutely extraordinary somewhere out there and being that first person to mention it to provide proof for it and to then basically be in a spotlight because of this now unfortunately in science this happens quite a lot and also unfortunately in science because of this there are two main problems one of the main problems with this is that eventually this causes the public to lose fate and to lose any kind of confidence in scientific discoveries in the scientific community and in scientists in general second of all the problem with this mentality is that this creates a kind of a race to try to be that one person to discover something incredible so that you can be in a spotlight which also often ends up in people making a lot of mistakes in the process and then basically becoming a kind of a pariah or just losing their job completely now that's not exactly what i wanted to focus on but it's really important to understand that when trying to figure out what we're looking at it's super important in science not to jump to conclusions especially when those conclusions can be explained by any other reasonable means and even though we all really want to believe in extraterrestrial intelligence and a lot of us actually are convinced the aliens are somewhere out there trying to explain a phenomenon that can be explained in different ways by basically implying that it's probably alien intelligence is actually a somewhat irresponsible thing to do at least for scientists it is totally okay if you're not a scientist though but if you are in a scientific community it is extremely important to be very prudent in investigating your claims and in trying to avoid turning a hypothesis into an actual fact because that's what's been happening with a lot of new discoveries in the last few decades planet 9 right here being the other culprit but anyway despite all of this i still wanted to really talk about this object because the new paper in some sense is kind of brilliant and in some sense it's actually extremely interesting to read what the scientists had to say but first of all let's actually talk about the shape of umamoa because what i've been showing you so far is this really unusual cigar-like shape but a lot of scientists really do not believe this was the shape at all as a matter of fact a lot of new studies including the study i talked about a few years ago determined that the shape probably looks something similar to what you see right here a kind of a flat pancake like shape or in some sense it also looks like basically a bar of soap after you use it for a very long time which is actually an important analogy because we're going to come back to this in a few minutes but unfortunately because all of the illustrations so far have been made using this shape i'm going to have to use this just to illustrate my point so we know that this object came into the solar system moving at a velocity slightly lower than would be expected from a typical interstellar object what this implies according to the scientists is that this object probably wasn't really traveling for a very long time across the interstellar space the suggestion here being that it's maybe about 500 million years stops possibly even less than that we also believe that it originally entered the outer solar system roughly around the year 1605 so essentially in the beginning of the astronomy and it's probably going to leave officially leave the solar system by the year 2430 moving at a speed of about 26.3 kilometers per second now one of the more unusual features of this object was of course its light curve for some reason this is what the scientists observed which they interpreted as the object tumbling around as it was basically moving through the solar system but the actual shape has been debated ever since at first it was a cigar shape later on scientists actually worked out that it was probably more of a disc shape but so far nothing really makes this object unusual but then something happened that the scientists didn't expect as they started to observe this object leaving the solar system they realized that there was a slight deviation between the observed orbit and the expected orbit now for comics that's actually totally not unusual we expect the comets as they emit a lot of material from their core generally start to change their orbit and trajectory just a little bit and usually this is correlated with the commentary tale itself but what made umamu different is that the commentary tale was not observed at all and so the trajectory here was changing yet at the same time the tail was not observed anywhere and because of this well that's where this explanation came from and honestly at least scientifically this still kind of doesn't make sense because there are so many other better explanations with two papers that you can find in the description below probably being the best explanation we have so far and in the paper there are really only two main assumptions that are being made one of them is that it was definitely a pancake shape and the second explanation well it's actually in this image to some extent it's the color of the object mixed with the idea of what it's actually made out of it was not made from the same material as typical comets we detect such as the famous 2020 neowise comet which usually are made out of different frozen gases all sorts of water ices and also carbon monoxide carbon dioxide methane and pneumonia a lot of these gases are usually visible and also emits certain types of colors as we look at them when the sun illuminates them from the distance but we also know that there are a lot of objects out there in the outer solar system such as for example objects in the same vicinity and in the same orbit as beautiful pluto right here that actually are made out of something different something that gives pluto this beautiful reddish color that's nitrogenized a lot of this red stuff you see on the surface that's basically nitrogen ice and that's something that evaporates very differently from the material that usually is present in most comets and so in other words what the scientists in this paper imply was that it was actually a chunk of nitrogen ice most likely separated from some distant pluto-like object in another star system or in other words it was basically a chunk of exoplanetary pluto or exopluto exodwarf planet whatever you want to call it with a very elegant explanation provided in this illustration right here so all this starts possibly about 400 to 500 million years ago as something collides with a distant pluto-like object in another star system and essentially jacks this really large piece that eventually escapes into the outer star system or essentially into the interstellar space now originally this chunk was probably more circular in shape but with time because of the way that nitrogen interacts with cosmic rays for example it slowly eroded through various types of radiation and in some sense just like your soap in your bathroom eventually becomes kind of flattened now you've all seen this before as you rub the soap around and as you basically use it over the next few weeks it eventually becomes really really flat same mechanism applies to what happened here it then enters the solar system approaches the closest point to the sun in 2017 and then eventually makes its way out of the solar system and just a few months later we were able to see it with the telescope and those deviations from the orbit were very likely caused by the evaporation of nitrogen ice from the surface and it just so happens that well as nitrogen evaporates it doesn't actually produce any kind of tails at all we would not really be seeing this anywhere and on top of this because this was a chunk of ice from another dwarf planet the implication here is that it was probably also a lot more reflective and thus the object was probably much smaller than the we initially assumed and by being so much smaller the amount of emissions coming from the object were able to deviate its orbit a lot more than initially predicted and so by being a reflective chunk of ice and by also emitting a lot of nitrogen in the process a lot of the observations of the orbital changes can be easily explained and are easily explained in this particular paper as a matter of fact this explanation seems to provide the exact match to everything we've seen so far even the reflectivity of this object was very very similar to the reflectivity we usually detect on objects like pluto and triton so in other words it was definitely a chunk of a dwarf planet or some sort of an object from another star system but from the same region where we usually discover dwarf planets and the object itself probably came from a relatively young star system that was still being developed something that just like the solar system in the beginning experienced a lot of different collisions which is why this object was probably released in the first place which of course also confirms that well it seems other star systems also have their own dwarf planets that are probably made of the same stuff as pluto triton and a lot of dwarf planets in the solar system but with recent estimates suggesting that approximately seven such objects should be passing through the solar system every single year we now have a great opportunity to possibly discover another one of these objects and study it in a lot more detail before it disappears once again and despite all of the other assumptions and controversy that this object created it still is one of the most interesting discoveries of the last decade and is definitely one of those discoveries that a lot of scientists will be talking about years to come but probably not because of this definitely because of what's in these two papers that you can find in the description below but unfortunately for now that's kind of all we know although for me personally this explanation is more than enough it provides all of the necessary answers and provides all the explanations to everything that was seen in this unusual object once we discover something else out there specifically once we find another one of these objects i'll make sure to fold this up with another video until then as someone once said keep your mind open but not so open that your brain falls out and well stay wonderful i'll see you tomorrow come back tomorrow to learn something else maybe subscribe maybe share this with someone who loves to learn about space and sciences and maybe support this channel on patreon by joining the channel membership or by buying the wonderful person t-shirt you can find in the description either way i'll see you tomorrow stay wonderful and as always bye [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Anton Petrov

Views: 1,029,196

Keywords: anton petrov, science, physics, astrophysics, astronomy, universe, whatdamath, what da math, technology, steven universe, space engine, universe sandbox 2, oumuamua, 'oumuamua, what is oumuamua, interstellar visitor, interstellar comet, nitrogen ice, what are comets made of, comet borisov, was oumumua an interstellar probe, interstellar probe, alien probe, extraterrestrial probe, oumuamua mystery, nitrogen ice emission, exodwarf planet, exoplanet, extrasolar visitor

Id: hkZRUs8A_9Q

Length: 12min 5sec (725 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 18 2021