Re: [TML] It was a light sail??
Tim 07 Nov 2018 03:26 UTC
On Tue, Nov 06, 2018 at 05:46:37PM -0800, Sudnadja (via tml list) wrote:
> I did project it’s motion forward and backward 3 million years (with
> the aggregate local simbad and gaia stars) and didn’t come up with
> anything: https://imgur.com/ow16W9y
As a matter of probability, it is likely that it has been in
interstellar space for millions of years.
The lower bound comes from estimates of the number of stars that we
have not yet charted. There are almost certainly stars within
10 parsecs that we have not yet detected (likely dim red dwarf stars).
If Oumuamua came from such a star, then it could possibly have
travelled in interstellar space for as short a time as 200 000 years.
If we project backward a million years, then the density of known
stars in the vicinity of the object is a small fraction of the
estimated true density of stars there. All we can really say is that
if it came from one of the small number of charted stars, it was at
least millions of years ago.
- Tim