First-known interstellar Solar System visitor 'Oumuamua 'comet' in disguise: Research
The cigar-shaped 'Oumuamua, the first interstellar object in recorded human history to whizz through the Solar System, is a comet after all, a pair of astronomers declared in research published in Nature on Wednesday.captured the imagination of scientists and space fans with its peculiar characteristics. It had a nobbly, rocky surface, and was elongated and flat unlike anything they had seen before. The object looked like it might be an asteroid, but behaved more like a comet.
Jennifer Bergner, assistant professor of astrochemistry at the University of Berkeley, and Darryl Seligman, an postdoctoral fellow studying theoretical and computational planetary science at Cornell University, and co-authors of the Nature, believe they have cracked the mystery by figuring out 'Oumuamua was powered by the outgassing of hydrogen gas as it was heated by the Sun.
They found old research papers which showed that cosmic rays bombarding ice could produce molecular hydrogen that was trapped within the ice. In Oumuamua's case, as it absorbed solar radiation, its ice produced hydrogen to propel it along its path, but the gas remained trapped underneath its surface so it didn't have a dust coma like typical comets do.
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