There are many intriguing hypotheses about the asteroid Oumuamua, discovered by astronomers at the Hawaiian Observatory in October 2017.
Oumuamua is believed to be the first discovered interstellar object to fly through the solar system. At first it was considered a comet, then transferred to asteroids, and in the summer of 2018 it was again named like a comet.
Its diameter is estimated at about 160 meters and most researchers now agree that it looks like a cigar.
Its length is a much more complex concept. Some indicate 180-240 meters, although much larger sizes are called. Including NASA in the summer of 2018 suggested that it is as much as 800 meters in length.
Oumuamua probably flew out of the constellation Lyra and moved along a hyperbolic trajectory at a speed of 26 km / s. As of June 1, 2018, the object's speed was already about 114 thousand km / h.
When the news about Oumuamua hit the press, ufologists and even some scientists around the world began to claim that Oumuamua was actually an alien ship. That is why they say it is so difficult to characterize and define as a comet or asteroid. He supposedly just masquerades as them.
It would also explain why it is either accelerating or slowing down, and besides, astronomers have found an anomaly in the trajectory of its movement.
And on October 19, 2018, the site of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (USA) published a report according to which astronomers suddenly lost Oumuamua. More precisely, they did not find him at the point at which he should have been according to their calculations.
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For thirty hours, astronomers tried to find Oumuamua using the IRAC camera of the Spitzer infrared space telescope, but to no avail.
However, scientists did find something, namely the absence of traces of dust and gas in the studied area of space. And this, they said, proves that Oumuamua is again not a comet, but an asteroid.
The researchers concluded that they did not find this asteroid, since it probably has already moved too far away, where the telescopes can no longer penetrate.
“Therefore, it will remain an interstellar mystery. However, he reminds us again that there are a lot of surprises in our outer space,”summarize the authors of the report.
