'Oumuamua Is Not Aliens

To learn to think like a scientist check out To repeat the space time maxim: it’s never aliens … until it is. So let’s talk about ‘oumuamua. Get your own Space Time t­-shirt at Tweet at us! @pbsspacetime Email us! pbsspacetime [at] gmail [dot] com Comment on Reddit: Help translate our videos! Previous Episode: Are Virtual Particles A New Layer of Reality? Hosted by Matt O'Dowd Written by Matt O'Dowd Graphics by Luke Maroldi Assistant Editing and Sound Design by Mike Petrow and Meah Denee Barrington Made by Kornhaber Brown (www.kornhaberbrown.com) Bialy & Loeb (2018) Micheli et al. (2018) Last year a visitor came to our inner solar system. To us it looked like a faint spot of light, moving quickly relative to the fixed stars. We’d seen similar things countless times before – lonely rocks, remnants from the formation of our solar system, drifting on their endless orbits around the sun and faintly glimmering with its reflected light. Nothing unusual about such asteroids and comets, but what made this object special was its trajectory. It was not in orbit around the Sun at all. Rather, it appeared to have fallen in from interstellar space, and was on its way back out again. The object is 1I/2017 U1, better known as ‘Oumuamua. It’s the first chunk of interstellar space debris we’ve ever spotted passing through our solar system. It caused a justifiable stir at the time. Hell, WE even did an episode on it. Big Bang David Nicklas CoolAsCats Anton Lifshits Fabrice Eap Justin Lloyd Juan Benet Quasar Tambe Barsbay Mark Rosenthal Dean Fuqua James Flowers Vinnie Falco Hypernova Chuck Zegar Jordan Young Joseph Salomone John Hofmann Martha Hunt Matthew O’Connor Ratfeast Brent Mullins Donal Botkin Edmund Fokschaner Max Levine Alexander Rodriguez Alexey Eromenko Brandon Cook Brandon Labonte Daniel Lyons David Crane Fabian Olesen Fauzan Ardhana Greg Allen Greg Weiss Jack Frosch James Hughes JJ Bagnell Jon Folks Joseph Emison Josh Thomas Kevin Warne Malte Ubl Mark Vasile Nathan Leniz Nicholas Rose Nick Virtue Scott Gossett Shannan Catalano Shawn Azman Tommy Mogensen سلطان الخليفي