It was around two years back that space scientists discovered Oumuamua, an interstellar object that reached the solar system. Oumuamua, from the very first day of its discovery, literally perplexed scientists, as it showed an unusual acceleration in its course across space. After observing this unusual acceleration, Avi Loeb, of the Harvard University suggested that Oumuamua could be an alien probe.
Oumuamua Mystery Continues
However, most of the other space scientists dismissed the claims made by Loeb, and they made it clear that Oumuamua's acceleration might be likely due to a natural process. In a study report published in June, researchers noted that solid hydrogen was blasting invisibly off Oumuamua's surface, and this phenomenon could be causing the unexpected acceleration.
Now, in a new study report published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Loeb and Thiem Hoang, an astrophysicist at the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, has claimed that the hydrogen hypothesis will not work in the real world, which means there could be still a scope that advanced aliens from deep space might have visited the solar system.
In the new paper, Loeb and Hoang claimed that the hydrogen iceberg explanation is basically flawed. According to the researcher duo, comets usually form when icy grains of dust bump into each other in space and form clumps. Later, these clumps will attract more dust and other clumps. The new study also claimed that comets are like snowmen, and they survive only as they don't melt.
Hydrogen Iceberg Could Not Have Traveled So Far
The new study argues that hydrogen iceberg traveling hundreds of millions of years through interstellar space would have fallen apart, but Oumuamua, in an unflinching manner screeched across the solar system, that too in a weird acceleration pattern.
"We wanted to not only test the assumptions in the theory but also the dark matter proposition. We were suspicious that hydrogen icebergs could not survive the journey — which is likely to take hundreds of millions of years — because they evaporate too quickly, and as to whether they could form in molecular clouds," said Loeb, SciTech Daily reports.
