Via a reader:  Hey, I’m probably not even an amateur.

‘Oumuamua’s Geometry Could Be More Extreme Than Previously Inferred‘

Recently, a visitor from beyond our solar sytem passed pretty closely to Earth.

With the observed and limited data, Oumuamua was clearly anomalous.  It likely had a 10/1 length to width ratio and was reflecting a lot of light, data which suggests a wobbling oblong or something nearly pancake-shaped (perhaps containing iron or other metals because it’s more reflective of the red, longer wavelengths on the visible light spectrum and it’s got to be of durable enough material to be so thin while surviving the roughness of interstellar space).

Our solar system is a fairly flat disk which is moving in relation to other star systems, all of which are traveling very quickly relative to Oumuamua, which was relatively stationary to these other systems when it came in at an angle to ours; speeding up again on its way out (perhaps not due to outgassing).

Dr. Avi Loeb has been working on lightsails, or thinking about how a civilization might travel and explore space and/or create something like a message in a bottle.   Below, he is interviewed on Event Horizon.

His not-ruled-out hypothesis will probably attract some UFO and alien public interest, but it seems, in my limited understanding, that as an anomaly, this is a discussion with a first-rate astronomer performing an interesting exercise in taking past experience, current knowledge and conventional explanations to their limits in trying to creatively identify something new.

It’s a big universe out there after all, and we’re just starting to get some better tools with which to view and understand it:

Robert Zubrin At The New Atlantis-‘Colonizing Mars: A Critique Of The SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System’…Stephen Hawking In Cosmos: Some Reasons Why We Should Continue Space Exploration