'Oumuamua: From Beyond the Stars

this episode is brought to you by curiositystream a subscription streaming service that offers thousands documentaries and non-fiction titles for just 2.99 a month more on them in a bit in the fall of 2017 humanity was witness to a world-changing first that october astronomers using hawaii's pan-starrs one telescope detected an object never before seen in our night sky known officially as one l 2017 u1 it looked like an asteroid but it behaved like a comet speeding up as it passed by our sun to reach a staggering 88 kilometers per second its shape was unusual too maybe 10 times longer than it was wide the object looked unlike anything previously seen but the most amazing thing wasn't how it behaved or how it looked it was where it had come from the objects those astronomers had detected had originated outside of our solar system for the first time in history humankind had welcomed an interstellar visitor today 1l 2017 u1 is better known as o muammua a hawaiian word that loosely translates as a visitor from afar arriving first but while most of us know its name almost everything else remains a mystery where it came from what it was made of and what caused it to act in such a strange way are still wide open questions today geographics is taking a look at the first known interstellar object and digging through some of the current theories to explain its origins in western history the year 1837 would be notable for several reasons in england a young monarch named victoria ascended to the throne beginning the second longest reign in british history not far away the writer charles dickens was starting his work on his seminal novel oliver twist while in north america michigan became the 26th state admitted to the union and congress passed a separate bill recognizing the republic of texas but while the earthbound events of 1837 would seem momentous to those living through them it was something happening far far away that would have the greatest impact on today's story millions of kilometers from earth a strange object crossed within a thousand au of our sun for the very first time today known as omuamur it came from impossibly far away further away than any other object previously seen in our night sky although it would be another 180 years before anyone on earth noticed its presence its destiny was now set omomur would become the first interstellar object recorded in human history during the near two centuries it took omua muah to reach the inner solar system human civilization underwent unprecedented changes and not just where wearing top hats and growing fabulous moustaches was concerned electricity was harnessed the theory of relativity discovered the atom split the digital revolution sparked by the time omuamua passed by us humankind would be ready to see it still there was nothing inevitable about omuamu's detection in fact seeing our first interstellar visitor relied on some extremely lucky breaks the first of those was the creation of pan stars a giant telescope set atop a mountain on the hawaiian island of maui pan stars one first went online in 2008 but didn't stop making regular observations until may 2010. while that may seem like a long time prior to omar moore's detection it was only a little over seven years this compared to the likely tens of millions or even billions of years that omuamua had been adrift had our visitor crossed that thousand au mark in 1827 rather than 1837 it would have sailed right on by without us ever noticing luckily that's not what happened even more luckily nasa's near-earth object observations program gave pan-starrs a funding boost that in 2014 allowed the telescope to begin spending 100 of its time looking for near-earth objects still we came frighteningly close to missing umur as it entered our solar system our first interstellar visitor came in at an unusual angle if you picture one of those solar system models that you saw in school maybe with the planets all lined up neatly on a flat plain then omuamua would be dive bombing in from above like a missile zooming towards our sun not that any missile had ever moved so fast currently the fastest human objects of the voyager spacecraft which are hurtling out of our solar system at 15 kilometers per second for voyager 2 and 17 kilometers a second for voyager 1. this is so fast that it makes a bullet shooting out of the barrel of an m16 look like a gentle morning stroll a bit in the matrix where neo dodges bullets while voyager 1 would have splattered him all over the rooftop before he even got a chance to flinch and el muammua ended our solar system traveling at 26 kilometers per second far faster than voyager 1. by the time it shot past our sun this already incredible speed would have increased by a factor of three all of which may explain why we nearly missed it on september the 9th 2017 omur reached something called perihelion the point where it gets closest to the sun as it went zooming away again it zipped by earth passing a mere .16 astronomical units from our planet one astronomical unit being the distance from our world to the sun by now it was october 14th it's easy to imagine another timeline in which this was it omouemua came barreling in and shooting back out again without anyone ever noticing but not in this timeline in this timeline pan stars was now less than a week away from discovery and it would change everything the morning of october 20th 2017 started like any other for robert work a canadian astronomer in his late 30s work was attached to the university of hawaii as a postdoctoral researcher tasked in part with monitoring images taken by panstarz1 when he first spotted the faint object captured in a 45 second exposure taken the night before he just assumed it was another asteroid one of many that had investigated over his career little did he know that it would be this single image that would secure his name a place in the history books after comparing the image to one taken on the night of october the 18th work became convinced that the team had spotted a new comet with telescope time tight he called in favors and probably made all sorts of outrageous promises to get another chance to track its movements but get another chance his team did it was then that they made two important discoveries the first was that this new comet was in a hyperbolic orbit which basically means it visits the sun a single time before vanishing back off again the second was that it hadn't originated in the cooper belt or the oort cloud or anywhere close to home tracking back its movements they could only conclude it had originated outside our solar system you can probably remember what came next the announcement made on october 26th the media scrum as we realized we were witnessing history in the making at first there was confusion over how to designate our visitor in the early days omuamu was named both a 2017 u1 for asteroid and c 2017 u1 for comet in the end the designation settled on began with one eye for interstellar it was the first time an object had ever received such a name yet the comet asteroid naming problem also highlighted another issue regarding omuamua no one could tell what the heck it was by the time work and his team announced their findings omumu was traveling so fast that there was only a three month window for observations to be made by late january 2018 even the hubble telescope would be incapable of tracking it so astronomers across the world scrambled to catch a glimpse of our visitor while they had the chance it's estimated that over 800 observations of omur took place over that winter what those observations recorded was an object unlike anything we thought would ever see at the time omuamu was first sighted humanity had logged around 750 thousand asteroids and comets in the night sky none of them looked anything like work's discovery as omamor retreated the light it reflected regularly grew and dimmed by a factor of 10 meaning it was spinning from there its size could be estimated and it's here that we get to the weird part omuamu was estimated to be between 100 and 400 meters long with a length of up to 10 times its width until that point the most extreme aspect ratio ever recorded had been an object only three times longer than it was wide clearly the cigar-shaped omuamua was a wholly new kind of beast and that raised an urgent question what else might be unique about it well we'll answer that question in a few minutes but first a quick word from today's space-loving sponsor curiositystream curiositystream is a subscription streaming service that offers thousands of documentaries and non-fiction titles from some of the world's best filmmakers including exclusive originals curiosity streams available on many platforms and web apps roku android xbox one smart tvs the list really does go on if you've got a device with a screen that is connected to the internet you're probably going to be able to watch curiosity 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was comparing omuamua to rama the alien world contained inside a spinning cylinder from arthur c clarke's rendezvous with rama while sadly nothing in reality could quite match up to clark's imagination what we did learn about omumu was still fascinating aside from its odd elongated shape we discovered that our first interstellar visitor was spinning like crazy rolling over sideways every nine or so hours and turning end over end roughly every two days we also learned what color it was a sort of reddish hue this isn't actually all that unusual in our solar system the cope belt object aracoth has a similar shade as do parts of pluto's surface more interesting turned out to be what omuamu was lacking a tail prior to omoemu's discovery it was assumed that the first interstellar object detected would be a comet and in some ways omamur did behave like a comet speeding up as it moved away from the sun normally comets do this because ice on or near their surface gets turned to gas by the sun's heat this gas then shoots off into space giving the comet some extra velocity a process known as outgassing it's this plus escaping dust that gives comets the bright tails that we see as they streak through the sky but omaha and were stubbornly refused to have a tail even when tracked for 30 hours by the spitzer space telescope which could see gases that would otherwise be invisible it showed no sign of outgassing which meant something else must be causing its acceleration an acceleration far beyond what gravity alone could achieve strange right well it gets stranger pretty much every other plausible explanation for omuamus speeding up was investigated and debunked over those months from the effects of drag or friction to omumu having a strong magnetic field that was being affected by the solar wind in the end all we could say is a species was that omuamua might have been a comet but if so it was the weirdest comet that anyone had ever seen sadly our chances to analyze this weird comet were fast running out in january 2018 the hubble telescope made humanity's last observations of our strange visitor not long after omur passed the orbit of jupiter and into history at the time of recording this video it's still in our solar system even traveling at its ridiculous speed it will take an age before it leaves our neighborhood but in case you're wondering here are some of these significant dates on its journey out in 2022 omomur will pass the orbit of neptune leaving even the ice giants behind two years later it will pass pluto's orbit then in 2025 it will fly beyond the kuiper belt come 2038 when things like the covid19 pandemic are hopefully just a memory it will overtake voyager 1 forever moving beyond the reach of even humanity's most distant object at last in 2196 omar moore will cross the point at last occupied back in 1837 the invisible line marking a thousand au from earth of course by that time it's entirely possible we'll have advanced far enough to send a hyper-fast probe after it one that can tell us once and for all really was but for now the true nature of our first interstellar visitor must remain a tantalizing mystery still that hasn't stopped scientists from coming up with some mind-blowing theories to try to explain it on august 30th 2019 less than eighteen months after we lost track of omur for good humanity made another incredible discovery 2i borisov named after the amateur crimean astronomer who found it was the second confirmed interstellar object ever detected a rogue comet it came streaking through our solar system with a vast visible tail of dust before finally fragmenting in early 2020. in other words it behaved exactly how we expected an interstellar object to behave which only served to further highlight how bizarre omuamua was if we were going to understand our first visitor we would need a suitably strange explanation thankfully science soon came up with some prime candidates one of the most popular theories about omuamu's origins came in a mid-2020 paper by two astrophysicists from yale in it they speculated that omuamua may have been a hydrogen iceberg although little research hydrogen icebergs are speculated to form in giant molecular clouds vast cold regions many light years across where stars are born in these clouds temperatures are so low that even hydrogen becomes a solid the theory goes that over many many years solid hydrogen molecules clump together to form an iceberg since the cause of these clouds lasts only a few hundred thousand years any icebergs that formed would have a maximum size one probably about equal to omur once the cause of the cloud dispersed these icebergs would be cast adrift as they floated through space the light of distant stars would slowly eat away at their surface potentially giving them weird elongated shapes importantly any hydrogen iceberg that got too close to the sun would start outgassing and speeding up dispersing gas in its wake but because the gas would be hydrogen none of our telescopes would likely detect it as you can probably imagine this theory landed like a bombshell although hydrogen icebergs are theoretical and almost never studied everything about the idea seemed to explained omua mua very neatly but before you clap your hands together and declare well problem solved you should know there are a few problems with this theory the major one is that it's not actually certain that hydrogen ice bows could survive all that long in space hydrogen's melting point is so close to absolute zero that it's thought even the radiation of distant stars would cause the iceberg to decay on its journey through the void as a result an omouemua size burg would have a maximum lifespan of about 40 million years and there's no indication omomura came from a giant molecular cloud close enough to support that time frame hence some scientists have theorized it was something else entirely a fragment of a shattered planet torn apart by its own star the theory comes from a paper published in spring of 2020. in it the authors speculate that omouemua was once part of a planet or comet or planetesimal orbiting a small dense star the last part is important because most stars would burn up any object that got too close but one just the right size like a kind of evil goldilocks would instead tear them to shreds with its gravity known as tidal disruption it would be a hell of a way to go whatever omuamua was once part of would have been torn to pieces in a process so violent it would have hurled jagged shards of rocks spinning off into interstellar space if one of these shards also happened to contain some ice trapped deep beneath its surface it could accelerate as it passed another sun just like omuamou the idea that omamur is a single fragment of a long dead planet destroyed in some forgotten cataclysm is all sorts of awe-inspiring since such a disaster is one of the few ways nature is known to create shard-like shapes on such a scale it may also well be true currently it's about the best explanation going even if it doesn't explain everything about our weird visitor but the fragments of a dead planet theory isn't the only one in town it's time for us to at last plunge into the waters of the most exciting theory of all that olmo was our first encounter with alien technology [Music] avi loeb has an impressive resume for the last decade he was chair of harvard university's astronomy department he's been an institute director for the harvard smithsonian center for astrophysics is involved with the board of national academies and also helps out with the breakthrough starshot project if you're wondering why this channel has suddenly morphed into cveographics it's because we want you to know that loeb isn't just some dude sat in his mom's basement wearing a tinfoil hat and ranting about the lizard people he's respected intelligent and he's absolutely convinced that omouamou came from an alien civilization remember earlier when we said omomur couldn't possibly live up to those internet memes comparing it to rama well turns out we were wrong if loeb is correct about this and it is a big if omumu's detection would be perhaps the most significant event in human history but not even loeb is clear about what that might actually mean that's because his theory allows two possibilities one that omuamu arrived by accident and two that it was centered deliberately the first possibility is simple enough at some point in the dim and distant past some unknown intelligent civilization sent something into deep space that something either had an accident or outlived its usefulness or broke up eventually forming the object that we call omumu the remnants of a bygone something that tumbled through space forgotten even by its creators until it was randomly snared by our son's gravity to back up this alien space junk theory loeb points to an object known as 2020so an asteroid discovered by pan stars in september of 2020 2020 so had a lot of the same stuff going as omur sunlight seemed to push it making it accelerate without any outgassing or comet tail unlike our muammar though 2020 so appeared to have originated in our solar system a team of astronomers traced its orbit back and discovered that it was a rocket booster from nasa's 1966 surveyor ii mission since we know that omoumour originated outside our solar system there's no chance that it was also nasa space junk but that's not loeb's point his point is that if 2020 so had that whole weird acceleration with no outgassing thing going on might that not be a hallmark of something artificial in other words maybe omuamua was the remains of a mission once flown by alien nasa intense as this possibility is though it's got nothing on loeb's second theory watipo muammua was sent to our solar system deliberately the thinking here is a little hazier but a lot of it seems to stem from omuamwo originating in what's known as the local standard of rest since we're not qualified astrophysicists big shock i know we're just going to defer to loeb when he says that this could be a sign of intelligence since anything entering our solar system from this region would effectively disguise its point of origin possibly something aliens would want to do from there loeb goes on to speculate that the mystery acceleration was the result of a light sail a type of technology we humans are currently developing that would allow a probe to be propelled purely by starlight if that's the case then loeb thinks our first interstellar visitor was a message in a bottle one designed to show any intelligent life that it encountered but they're not alone currently rv rvlobe is very much in the minority with his theories the vast majority of scientists still think omuamua was the result of natural phenomena but since we can't say for certain what it was we also can't say for certain that it wasn't some remnants from a distant civilization far beyond our understanding and for now at least that's where we have to leave it at the time of recording omamur remains one of only two interstellar objects that humanity's ever encountered but already there are signs that this could change in late 2022 the large synoptic survey telescope in chile is intended to begin a 10-year survey of our night sky among other things it's expected that the telescope will be able to detect any other interstellar objects that enter our solar system with one detection per year expected on average it's at this point that things get interesting if we start to spot more and more objects like omuamua the mystery will quickly fade just as the first pulsar ever detected was initially speculated to be a signal from another planet it could be that omoamwa is just one of those weird things we don't yet understand about our universe a commonish object we've just never seen before on the other hand if our database of interstellar objects grows but we never again find another elongated spinning shard well it would prove at the very least that omua really was a unique event so this is where our story ends today not really with a conclusion but with a mystery one with implications so profound they could alter our entire understanding of the universe but even if it does turn out that there are trillions of omua muas out there that won't change the importance of its discovery in the fall of 2017 for the first time in human history we witnessed something no one else had ever witnessed before the first known arrival from another solar system think about that for just a second in the annals of space exploration there are some events that will never be forgotten the first satellite in space the first black hole detected the first human to set foot on another world to their number we can now add the detection of omur our first arriving visitor from afar so i really hope you found that video interesting if you did please do hit that thumbs up button below don't forget to 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Channel: Geographics

Views: 478,904

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Id: MarE0gP5-hw

Length: 21min 56sec (1316 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2021