{"id":99219,"date":"2019-07-02T08:00:33","date_gmt":"2019-07-02T18:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/?p=99219"},"modified":"2019-07-01T16:49:09","modified_gmt":"2019-07-02T02:49:09","slug":"natural-origin-for-oumuamua","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/2019\/07\/02\/natural-origin-for-oumuamua\/","title":{"rendered":"Two UH<\/abbr> astronomers part of international team that agrees on a natural origin for \u02bbOumuamua"},"content":{"rendered":"Reading time: <\/span> 4<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>
\"Oumuamua
This artist’s impression shows the first interstellar object discovered in the Solar System, ʻOumuamua. Observations made with the NASA\/ESA<\/abbr> Hubble Space Telescope, CFHT<\/abbr>, and others, show that the object is moving faster than predicted while leaving the Solar System.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A team of international asteroid and comet experts now agree that ʻOumuamua<\/span>, the first recorded interstellar visitor, has natural origins, despite previous speculation by some other astronomers that the object could be an alien spacecraft sent from a distant civilization to examine our star system.<\/p>\n

A review of all the available evidence by an international team of 14 experts, including Robert Jedicke<\/strong> and Karen Meech<\/strong> of the University of Â鶹´«Ã½<\/span>\u2019s Institute for Astronomy<\/a> (IfA<\/abbr>), strongly suggests that ʻOumuamua<\/span> has a purely natural origin. The research team reported its findings in the July 1, 2019, issue of Nature Astronomy<\/em>.<\/p>\n

“While ʻOumuamua<\/span>\u2019s interstellar origin makes it unique, many of its other properties are perfectly consistent with objects in our own solar system,” said Jedicke. ʻOumuamua<\/span>\u2019s orbit and its path through our solar system matches a prediction published in a scientific journal by Jedicke and his colleagues half a year before ʻOumuamua<\/span>\u2019s discovery.<\/p>\n

“It was exciting and exhausting to coordinate all the ʻOumuamua<\/span> observations with my co-authors from all around the world,” said Meech. “It really was a 24-hour-a-day effort for the better part of two months. In that paper we established that ʻOumuamua<\/span> rotates once in about seven hours and that it had a red color similar to many objects locked within our own solar system.”<\/p>\n

The work showed that ʻOumuamua<\/span> must have an extremely elongated shape, like a cigar or maybe a frisbee, unlike any known object in our solar system based on changes in its apparent brightness while it rotated.<\/p>\n

UH<\/abbr> team provides essential analysis<\/h2>\n

Meech and other UH<\/abbr> researchers were essential to another paper published in Nature<\/em> a year ago that indicated ʻOumuamua<\/span> is accelerating along its trajectory as it leaves our solar system. This behavior is typical of comets but astronomers have found no other visual evidence of the gas or dust emissions that create this acceleration.<\/p>\n