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Hawaii telescope object11/13/2023 ![]() Lastly, on its way out of the solar system, 'Oumuamua gave astronomers one more giant mystery: It appeared to be accelerating, moving away from the sun at a slightly faster pace with every passing day. So why should 'Oumuamua have something very close to the average number? It remains a mystery. However, most of those stars have individual velocities much higher than that. ![]() The interstellar visitor entered the solar system with a velocity very close to the local standard of rest, which is the average velocity of stars in our neighborhood. But it didn't act like a comet, the most common small object at those distances from the sun. 'Oumuamua has a dusty red color, which is similar to the hues of other deep-solar system objects. No other known asteroid or comet has a shape that extreme (although, to be fair, our catalog of objects 100 meters or larger isn't exactly complete). 'Oumuamua is perhaps the strangest object we have ever seen inside the solar system. Those observations are all the information we'll ever have about this mysterious visitor 'Oumuamua is already too distant and too dim to be seen with even our most powerful instruments, and no rocket could ever hope to catch up with it. Given the object's incredible speed and steep angle relative to the rest of the system, 'Oumuamua was not gravitationally bound to the sun.Īstronomers monitored 'Oumuamua with a variety of ground- and space-based observatories for about 11 days. Based on that variation in the light, astronomers determined that 'Oumuamua is much longer than it is wide, by a factor of five to 10, meaning it's shaped like either a cigar or a pancake.īy the time 'Oumuamua was detected, it was already on its way out of the solar system. Reflected sunlight from 'Oumuamua continually dimmed and brightened, telling astronomers that the object was tumbling end over end every few hours. 'Oumuamua isn't large its biggest side is between 10 and 100 meters (33 to 330 feet) wide it could fit comfortably inside a football field.
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