Outgassing As Trigger of 1I/`Oumuamua’s Nongravitational Acceleration: Could This Hypothesis Work at All?. (arXiv:1905.00935v1 [astro-ph.EP])
<a href="http://arxiv.org/find/astro-ph/1/au:+Sekanina_Z/0/1/0/all/0/1">Zdenek Sekanina</a>
The question of what triggered the nongravitational acceleration of
1I/`Oumuamua continues to attract researchers’ attention. The absence of any
signs of activity notwithstanding, the prevailing notion is that the
acceleration of the stellar, cigar-like object was prompted by outgassing.
However, the Spitzer Space Telescope’s failure to detect `Oumuamua not only
ruled out the CO_2 and/or CO driven activity (Trilling et al. 2018), but made
the cigar shape incompatible with the optical observations. Choice of water ice
as the source of outgassing is shown to be flawed as well: (i) the water
sublimation law is demonstrably inconsistent with the observed variations in
the nongravitational acceleration derived by Micheli et al. (2018), the point
that should have been assertively highlighted; and (ii) an upper limit of the
production rate of water is estimated at as low as 4 x 10^(23) molecules
s^(-1), requiring that, at most, only a small area of the surface be active, in
which case the conservation of momentum law is satisfied only when `Oumuamua’s
bulk density is extremely low, <0.001 g cm^(-3), reminiscent of the formerly
proposed scenario with `Oumuamua as a fragment of a dwarf interstellar comet
disintegrating near perihelion, with the acceleration driven by solar radiation
pressure (Sekanina 2019a) and no need for activity at all. This conclusion is
possible thanks to the high quality of astrometry and Micheli et al.'s orbital
analysis, whose results were confirmed by the computations of other authors.
The question of what triggered the nongravitational acceleration of
1I/`Oumuamua continues to attract researchers’ attention. The absence of any
signs of activity notwithstanding, the prevailing notion is that the
acceleration of the stellar, cigar-like object was prompted by outgassing.
However, the Spitzer Space Telescope’s failure to detect `Oumuamua not only
ruled out the CO_2 and/or CO driven activity (Trilling et al. 2018), but made
the cigar shape incompatible with the optical observations. Choice of water ice
as the source of outgassing is shown to be flawed as well: (i) the water
sublimation law is demonstrably inconsistent with the observed variations in
the nongravitational acceleration derived by Micheli et al. (2018), the point
that should have been assertively highlighted; and (ii) an upper limit of the
production rate of water is estimated at as low as 4 x 10^(23) molecules
s^(-1), requiring that, at most, only a small area of the surface be active, in
which case the conservation of momentum law is satisfied only when `Oumuamua’s
bulk density is extremely low, <0.001 g cm^(-3), reminiscent of the formerly
proposed scenario with `Oumuamua as a fragment of a dwarf interstellar comet
disintegrating near perihelion, with the acceleration driven by solar radiation
pressure (Sekanina 2019a) and no need for activity at all. This conclusion is
possible thanks to the high quality of astrometry and Micheli et al.’s orbital
analysis, whose results were confirmed by the computations of other authors.
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