(November 21, 2018 at 5:27 pm)Jehanne Wrote: It is on a hyperbolic orbit, which, per Newtonian mechanics, should be completely predictable. Why the deviation from the hyperbola?
That is the question.
Impact with another object is ridiculously improbable and would have produced debris. It's also been accelerating over a fair bit of time rather than a one-off bump.
Outgassing of volatiles wasn't observed. It may be too distant to make out the gasses, though that seems unlikely.
Both of the above should have altered the rate of its tumble, but that wasn't observed either.
It's possible that it's a light sail or fragment of a light sail, though the reddish colour makes that unlikely. The better answer is our old stand-by, "We don't know." It has made Oumuamua a bit more interesting though. Regardless of what it is, it's unlikely that our first detection of a large extra-solar object is wildy anomalous, so we'll likely be visiting something similar with a probe in the next decade or two.
