"Oumuamua is an extremely rare object, and is believed to be the Solar System’s first interstellar visitor to pass through."
... that we've noticed.
The chances of it actually being the first are essentially nil.
'Oumuamua, the odd elongated cigar-shaped interstellar object zipping through the Solar System, continues to flummox scientists. What is that thing? At first, there were a group of fantasists who believed it was an alien starship. Those claims were quickly debunked by researchers who classified it as an interstellar asteroid …
<Pedant Alert=True>
I think you'll find that the actual quote is:
"Oumuamua is an extremely rare object, and is believed to be the Solar System’s first interstellar visitor to be seen passing through."
So your sentence "... that we've noticed." is redundant.
<Pedant Alert=False>
Carry on.
even bigger pedant alert!
"Oumuamua is an extremely rare object, and is believed to be the Solar System’s first interstellar visitor to be seen passing through."
As light is made from photons which are considered particles (from a particle physics point of view) we have seen numerous interstellar visitors - billions every second - albeit very small visitors.
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If it really is dildo shaped (believed to be approx 235m x 35m) then I can't see how it could possibly be a comet because comets form by accretion in a low-gravity environment and are poorly consolidated, and with those proportions and tumbling end-over-end, it wouldn't be able to hold itself together by its own gravity.
The only place that I can think of, where the material could be sufficiently consolidated to hold itself together, would be on a rocky planet, which suggests that it might be a fragment of a destroyed planet or, more probably, a planetesimal in a forming planetary system around a young star, where and when collisions between planetesimals are believed to be common.
Finally, the great space turd mystery of 1969 has been solved
Not sure about that as it's quite a big larger than one would expect from a mere human. But you might be right about it being poop, after all, there have been in the past "giants" called Nephilim (per Genesis, KJV) and if we look at "there's an element of truth behind every legend" then... this is the poop of giants or maybe a very, very large dog..
All it's gas making stuff is burned off.
But I thought comets are either "rocky snowballs" with a mix of various ices and rock lumps, or a rocky core wrapped in an ice layer.
So the egg shape would seem to be the real mystery here.
Of course if this thing really has been in interstellar space getting some samples off its surface (or some detailed surface analysis) would seem like quite a good idea.
Of course if this thing really has been in interstellar space getting some samples off its surface (or some detailed surface analysis) would seem like quite a good idea.
Maybe the next one if we spot it coming in, and manage to get Bruce Willis out of his cryo container and defrosted in time. For this one you'll need a mighty fast rocket just to catch up with it, and then there's the getting it back.
Slight correction: It's not Sol's heat that sublimes off bits of comets to form the tail, it's the solar wind, that constant stream of highly energetic particles from which the Earth's magnetic field largely protects we humble Terrans. This is why, regardless of direction of travel of the body, the tail will always point away from the local star.
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Your both right. Heat is transferred away from the sun in the forms of direct energy and high energy particles.
The impact from the particles causes localised heating (think of it as little explosions or perhaps better, think of it as a missile hitting a target - the missile might be small and the target big, but it does transfer a lot of energy!). This heating is dependent on the local strength of the solar wind.
The direct energy from the Sun is gentler but constant. Light radiation interacting with the particles causes heating exactly like what ahppens every day on Earth.
Which of these two is dominant depends on how far from the sun you are (as direct energy tapers off via the inverse square law), and how strong the local solar wind is.
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