Interstellar Object Identified As Cookie-Shaped Planet Shard
INTERSTELLAR OBJECT – The solar system’s first known interstellar object is a planet shard with a shape of a cookie.
According to a Tweet thread by Philippine Star, the first known interstellar visitor is neither a comet nor asteroid, which was firstly suspected. It also certainly doesn’t have the shape of a cigar.
A new study shows that it is likely a remnant of a Pluto-like world with the shape of a cookie.
Astronomers from the Arizona State University reported that the 148-foot object appears to be made from frozen nitrogen like the surface of Pluto and Neptune’s largest moon Triton.
Alan Jackson and Steven Desch. the authors of the study, think that an impact knocked down a chunk off an icy nitrogen-covered planet 500 million years ago, sending this object out of its solar system and toward ours.
The red object, used to be a sliver of its original self, has its layers evaporated by cosmic radiation and the sun.
The object was named Oumuamua, which is Hawaiian for scout, which is in honor of the observatory in Hawaii that discovered it in 2017.
Seen only as a pinpoint of light millions of miles away at its closest approach and was determined to have originated beyond our solar system due to its peed and path indicating that it does not orbit around the sun or anything else.
Based on the report, the only other object confirmed to have strayed from another star system towards our own is the comet 21/Borisov, which was discovered in 2019.
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