(BIVN) – A team of international experts agrees that ʻOumuamua, the first interstellar object ever observed within our solar system, has natural origins, “despite previous speculation by some other astronomers that the object could be an alien spacecraft sent from a distant civilization to examine our star system”, a University of Hawaiʻi media release says.

Two UH astronomers – Robert Jedicke and Karen Meech of the University of Hawaiʻi’s Institute for Astronomy (IfA) – joined a team of 14 international asteroid and comet experts that reported its findings on July 1 in an issue of Nature Astronomy.

In November 2017, the object made headlines for being the first interstellar visitor ever observed in our solar system. UH IfA astronomers made the discovery using the Pan-STARRS telescope on Haleakala. Numerous Mauna Kea facilities also made observations and collected data.

Not only was the object the first to be denoted by the International Astronomical Union with the letter “I” for interstellar, it was also been given a Hawaiian name.

ʻOumuamua was chosen in consultation with UH-Hilo Hawaiian language experts Kaʻiu Kimura and Larry Kimura. The name is said to reflect the way this object is like a scout or messenger, sent from the distant past to reach out to us.

In June 2018, astronomers reported a peculiar, non-gravitational acceleration to ʻOumuamua’s trajectory. The observation stirred debate in the scientific community, and one pair of astronomers from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics suggested that ‘Oumuamua’s increase in speed could be explained by “solar radiation pressure“, or a light-sail of extra-terrestrial origin. 

Today’s UH news release debunks the alien-origin theory:

“While ʻOumuamua’s interstellar origin makes it unique, many of its other properties are perfectly consistent with objects in our own solar system,” said Jedicke. ʻOumuamua’s orbit and its path through our solar system matches a prediction published in a scientific journal by Jedicke and his colleagues half a year before ʻOumuamua’s discovery.

“It was exciting and exhausting to coordinate all the ʻOumuamua observations with my co-authors from all around the world,” said Meech. “It really was a 24-hour-a-day effort for the better part of two months. In that paper we established that ʻOumuamua rotates once in about seven hours and that it had a red color similar to many objects locked within our own solar system.”

The work showed that ʻOumuamua must have an extremely elongated shape, like a cigar or maybe a frisbee, unlike any known object in our solar system based on changes in its apparent brightness while it rotated.

Meech and other UH researchers were essential to another paper published in Nature a year ago that indicated ʻOumuamua is accelerating along its trajectory as it leaves our solar system. This behavior is typical of comets but astronomers have found no other visual evidence of the gas or dust emissions that create this acceleration.

“While it is disappointing that we could not confirm the cometary activity with telescopic observations, it is consistent with the fact that ʻOumuamua’s acceleration is very small and must therefore be due to the ejection of just a small amount of gas and dust,” Meech explained.”

“We have never seen anything like ʻOumuamua in our solar system,” said Matthew Knight of the University of Maryland. “Our preference is to stick with analogs we know, unless, or until we find something unique. The alien spacecraft hypothesis is a fun idea, but our analysis suggests there is a whole host of natural phenomena that could explain it.”

The team of astronomers hailing from the U.S. and Europe met late last year at the International Space Science Institute (ISSI) in Bern, Switzerland, to critically assess all the available research and observations on ʻOumuamua and will meet again later this year. Their first priority was to determine whether there is any evidence to support the hypothesis that ʻOumuamua is a spacecraft built by an alien civilization.

“We put together a strong team of experts in various different areas of work on ʻOumuamua. This cross-pollination led to the first comprehensive analysis and the best big-picture summary to date of what we know about the object,” Knight explained. “We tend to assume that the physical processes we observe here, close to home, are universal. And we haven’t yet seen anything like ʻOumuamua in our solar system. This thing is weird and admittedly hard to explain, but that doesn’t exclude other natural phenomena that could explain it.”

The ISSI team considered all the available information in peer-reviewed scientific journals and paid special attention to the research published by IfA researchers. In particular, Meech’s research paper in the journal Nature first reported on ʻOumuamua’s discovery and characteristics in December 2017, just two months after the unusual object was identified by Pan-STARRS1 (Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System) on Haleakalā.

The ISSI team considered a number of mechanisms by which ʻOumuamua could have escaped from its home system. For example, the object could have been ejected by a gas giant planet orbiting another star. According to this theory, Jupiter created our own solar system’s Oort cloud, a population of small objects only loosely gravitationally bound to our Sun in a gigantic shell extending to about a third of the distance to the nearest star. Some of the objects in our Oort cloud eventually make it back into our solar system as long period comets while others may have slipped past the influence of the Sun’s gravity to become interstellar travelers themselves.

The research team expects that ʻOumuamua is just the first of many interstellar visitors discovered passing through our solar system, and they are collectively looking forward to data from the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) that is scheduled to be operational in 2022. The LSST, located in Chile, may detect one interstellar object every year and allow astronomers to study the properties of objects from many other solar systems.

While ISSI team members hope that LSST will detect more interstellar objects, they think it is unlikely that astronomers will ever detect an alien spacecraft passing through our solar system and they are convinced that ʻOumuamua was a unique and extremely interesting but completely natural object.

The research paper, “The Natural History of ʻOumuamua,” the ʻOumuamua ISSI Team (Michele Bannister, Asmita Bhandare, Piotr Dybczyński, Alan Fitzsimmons, Aurélie Guilbert-Lepoutre, Robert Jedicke, Matthew Knight, Karen Meech, Andrew McNeill, Susanne Pfalzner, Sean Raymond, Colin Snodgrass, David Trilling and Quanzhi Ye), was published in the journal Nature Astronomy on July 1, 2019.