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About 1.3 million years ago the object may have passed within a distance of 0.16 parsecs (0.52 light-years) to the nearby star TYC 4742-1027-1, but its velocity is too high to have originated from that star system, and it probably just passed through the system's Oort cloud at a relative speed of about 15 km/s (34,000 mph; 54,000 km/h).
'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.
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.
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]
The top speed of the world's fastest roller coaster, Formula Rossa. 90: 320: 200: 3 × 10 −7: Typical speed of a modern high-speed train (e.g. latest generation of production TGV); a diving peregrine falcon—fastest bird; 320 km/h or 200 mph is a parameter sometimes used in defining a supercar. [15] 91: 328: 204: 3.04 × 10 −7
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.
Thus, they should travel at exactly the speed of light, according to special relativity. However, since the discovery of neutrino oscillations, it is assumed that they possess some small amount of mass. [1] Thus, they should travel slightly slower than light, otherwise their relativistic energy would become infinitely large. This energy is ...