Avi Loeb: `Oumuamua is EXTRATERRESTRIAL (#307)

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

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Recently, Bergner and Seligman explained the behavior of the first interstellar object, ‘Oumuamua, as a rare form of a quite common object, a comet. They claim it "began as an icy planetesimal that was irradiated at low temperatures by cosmic rays during its interstellar journey, and experienced warming during its passage through the Solar System. This explanation is supported by a large body of experimental work."

But Avi Loeb disagrees: “In a new paper published recently in Nature -- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05687-w Acceleration of 1I/‘Oumuamua from radiolytically produced H2 in H2O ice -- Jennifer Bergner and Darryl Seligman suggest that the peculiar acceleration observed by the first known interstellar object `Oumuamua, can be explained if `Oumuamua was made of water ice which was partly dissociated into hydrogen by cosmic-rays along its interstellar journey. In the abstract of the paper, the authors admit that past models involving a pure hydrogen iceberg or a pure nitrogen iceberg do not work due to theoretical or observational inconsistencies. In fact, the hydrogen iceberg model was proposed in a previous 2020 paper by Darryl Seligman himself. A few months later, Avi wrote a paper with Thiem Hoang, showing that heating by interstellar starlight would destroy hydrogen icebergs too quickly and not allow them to reach the solar system from their likely formation sites of giant molecular clouds.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05687-w

Read Hoang and Loeb's response paper:

https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/Hoang_Loeb_23.pdf

• Essay: https://avi-loeb.medium.com/oumuamua-was-not-a-hydrogen-water-iceberg-1dd2f7a6107f
• https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.00092.pdf
• https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/24/harvard-physicist-pacific-expedition-first-interstellar-meteor

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