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Its light curve, assuming little systematic error, presents its motion as "tumbling" rather than "spinning", and moving sufficiently fast relative to the Sun that it is likely of extrasolar origin. Extrapolated and without further deceleration, its path cannot be captured into a solar orbit, so it will eventually leave the Solar System and ...
'Oumuamua had an incoming V inf of 26.5 kilometres per second (59,000 mph), but due to its low perihelion distance of only 0.255 au, it had an eccentricity of 1.200. However, Borisov's V inf was only slightly higher, at 32.3 km/s (72,000 mph), but due to its higher perihelion distance of ~2.003 au, its eccentricity was a comparably higher 3.340.
ʻOumuamua was at first thought to be traveling too fast for any existing spacecraft to reach. [9] [10] The Initiative for Interstellar Studies (i4is) launched Project Lyra to assess the feasibility of a mission to ʻOumuamua. [4] Several options for sending a spacecraft to ʻOumuamua within a time-frame of 5 to 25 years were suggested. [11] [12]
In the context of this article, "faster-than-light" means the transmission of information or matter faster than c, a constant equal to the speed of light in vacuum, which is 299,792,458 m/s (by definition of the metre) [3] or about 186,282.397 miles per second. This is not quite the same as traveling faster than light, since:
For example, for visible light, the refractive index of glass is typically around 1.5, meaning that light in glass travels at c / 1.5 ≈ 200 000 km/s (124 000 mi/s); the refractive index of air for visible light is about 1.0003, so the speed of light in air is about 90 km/s (56 mi/s) slower than c.
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The book describes the 2017 detection of ʻOumuamua, the first known interstellar object to pass through the Solar System. [8] [9] Loeb, an astronomer at Harvard University, speculates that the object might be an extraterrestrial artifact, [10] a suggestion considered unlikely by the scientific community collectively.
At around 600 miles wide and up to 6,000 meters (nearly four miles) deep, the Drake is objectively a vast body of water. To us, that is. To the planet as a whole, less so.