oumuamua: mysterious coat of carbon-rich gunk hiding an icy heart

ilx has not properly welcomed our visitor

What are you so afreud of

HI DERE

What you say about mymuamua

oumuagoodness

It looks prime for development, sadly it just moves a bit too fast to get the builders on board.

here is a bad article about it:
https://www.maxim.com/news/top-astronomer-believes-weird-asteroid-could-be-alien-probe-2017-12

Glad he added he the ET subtitle, otherwise I might have needed Finton O'Toole to explain what the hell he was on about.

This is an incredibly cool interstellar object, someone was saying on PM earlier that it was so fast that it was already out of sight before we knew it was even there. I would welcome these enigmatic and small objects. It is the idea of rogue planets that scare the shit out of me, nothing to do with that von Trier movie either.

Pedantry: there's a letter missing at the start of the name here: the ʻokina (which is also conveniently the first letter of the word ʻokina), a kind of Hawaiian glottal stop.

Having said that,

ʻoumuamua, papa ʻoumuamua
papa ʻoumuamua, ʻoumuamua
wella don't you know about the bird,
well everybody knows that the bird is the word
etc

oumuamua what's on your ipod

i just now overheard a little old man excitedly explaining the situation to a stranger in the w.h.smiths at liverpool street station: he perhaps rather boldly began by insisting that scientists were excited bcz it is "not made of rock"

bless his heart

makes me wanna give him a hug

oumuamua what's on your ipod

Help, I'm (Not) A Rock

kiss - rock and roll all nite

steve miller band - the joker

If aliens come I kind of hope its nto for a while beucase what if they grab us and take us in spaceshpis and we are like in their jails - not good

ouuuuu muamua mia, here I go again

xp

ull b the 1st to go

theyre like reptiles
they smell fear like a lil chihuahua smells poo

opnly if its like cocoon - good orgasm aliens sexy and good

sure but they all look like 100 yr old grannies

so dont get yr knickers in a twist

uparently you never seen taht kind a blue movie fella

Just sayin

Not everythins like the movies sweethaht

shitposting is bad again

Artemis, the Holy Black Stone of Mecca, is considered a sacred meteorite from the gods by the Muslim faith.

"And when the town clerk had quieted the crowd, he said, "Men of Ephesus, what man is there who does not know that the city of the Ephesians is temple keeper of the great Artemis, and of the sacred stone that fell from the sky?"

Jamaican Black Stone, which is a mysterious and allegedly dangerous substance that some men rub onto their knob to cure premature ejaculation and then have four hour sex marathons. In 2008 somebody tried eating some and died, some reports say it contains poisonous Toad venom.

I can only assume bad means cool

similarities and differences between oumuamua and the poo i did this morning:

similar shape, different size
one means "messenger from distant past," the other is a messenger from my recent past

both carbon based

one moving fast, the other moving slow

Mike Pence: "The United States are going to send a probe onto a slow moving turd by 2020"

I saw tis indian film of two nude people going at it reproductively for an hour in the pouiring rain ! what was that !?!

seriosly!

’oumuamua what's on your ipod
Pink Floyd - Interstellar Overdrive and Have a Cigar
Muddy Waters - Rollin’ and Tumblin’

it's a panspermia starter kit

Earth: Fertilizer: Let's Go!

earth to be spaded under, rock and roll

"Interstellar cumshot"

"Now a pair of Harvard researchers are raising the possibility that Oumuamua is an alien spacecraft"

(well it kind of throws it in at the end to get attention, the paper is actually about a possible cause of its "non-gravitational acceleration")

(the artist's impression that everyone runs with pop versions of this story rather disguises the fact that it is not zipping along like a needlenose rocket but whirling end to end like a boomerang, the aliens within presumably unable to correct this bcz they've been dizzy to the point of vomiting for at least the last 14,500 years, when they were sideswiped by a big space truck turning carelessly out of the alpha centauri feed-route)

absolute unit imo

'oumuamunit

in your face gustave eiffel

https://metrouk2-files-wordpress-com.cdn.ampproject.org/ii/w1200/s/metrouk2.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/prc_63486593.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&zoom=1&resize=480%2C406

first alien probe of the space age reaches us and all the impressive assemblage of telescopes and sensors on planet earth are asleep on the job and only get a half decent shot of it. Typical.

https://i.imgur.com/cmmAhsI.jpg

tbf they didn't say it's the whole ship, just a wing mirror

There was a fun thread on Twitter a few days ago linking it to the Trump ‘space force’ announcement, the mysterious closure of a major US observatory by the FBI, several key satellite telescopes going ‘offline’ at the same time. It’s the kind of good old-fashioned conspiracy theory I have been missing.

I googled the FBI observatory thing.. supposedly it was a janitor looking at porn what caused all the ruckus. BUT THAT'S A VERY CONVENIENT EXCUSE amirite conspiracy friends?

sometimes a cigar-shaped alien asteroid is just a

that janitor's name was Faux Mullder

fucks boulders morelike

i don't generally read them but i just realised i am pathologically unable to delete any rando email that comes my way which contains the words ANCIENT ALIENS (usually but not always from pinterest).

JUST IN CASE i guess

also this reminds me that whenever i see some bozo (or it may be not entirely a bozo) with the given job description "theorist", the phrase that comes unbidden into my head is "Ancient Alien Theorists argue that… "

https://media.giphy.com/media/fLmiz1Ogta3bbOdBXx/giphy.gif

cant wait for avi so-called loeb's *next* highly original book == "thread of dinosaurs gazing hapless at the oncoming meteor"

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/interstellar-visitor-found-to-be-unlike-a-comet-or-an-asteroid

(old article, but I don't think it was linked before)

close but no cigar

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/mar/18/space-oddity-oumuamua-probably-shard-of-pluto-like-world-scientists-say

poor Pluto - even less of not a planet anymore.

oh "Pluto-like"

just read that there might be an estimated 50 billion rogue planets in the milky way, some 3d billiards game is that.

wait so this flying object is merely cookie-shaped, as in cookie-shaped like some sort of SAUCER?

pilot (arriving in solar system): "this looks like a good spot my dear"
alien (sitting in next seat, not driving but staring): "not here not here not here!"

Busy outer solar system out there

https://entertainment.time.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2012/02/asteroids.jpg

more updates on the "exo-Pluto" theory

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/science/astronomy-oumuamua-comet.html

god it looks delicious

2022 update
https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/was-interstellar-object-oumuamua-a-chunk-of-exo-pluto/

Here is where we get to the new (and, as yet, unpublished) work. Our Sun isn’t the most common type of star; cooler M-type stars are much more common. M stars are more favorable environments for the creation of worlds covered in nitrogen ice. In our solar system, you have to be nearly at the orbit of Neptune, at 15 a.u., for nitrogen ice to be stable on the surface. However, stars at the lower end of the mass range (technically classified as M8) can host worlds with nitrogen ice at only 1 a.u.

Taking into account the huge population of M stars and their more favorable environments for hosting nitrogen ice, Desch and Jackson found that M stars will have ejected 40 times more nitrogen ice fragments than stars like our Sun.

That contrast is enough for `Oumuamua’s appearance in our backyard to be a likely accident. Its trajectory, which lies in the galactic plane and has relatively low speed for an interstellar interloper, indicates that it hasn’t been roaming the galaxy on its own for very long; it probably exited its parent solar system up to a few hundred million years ago.

it hasn’t been roaming the galaxy on its own for very long... up to a few hundred million years ago.

astronomers have funny ideas about time

NEWS 🚨: Unidentified Oumuamua interstellar object is just now RE-ENTERING THE SOLAR SYSTEM WITH A STEEL CHAIR pic.twitter.com/LQmzm0afbY

— lindsay coagvla 🚫🤠 (@titwave) December 8, 2022

the James Webb Space Telescope discovers enormous distant galaxies that SHOULD NOT EXIST

in conclusion the universe is so effing big it is yielding contradictory data to stupid little confused lifeforms

it's too big!

Why does anything exist? did they answer that one yet? seems a bit improbable that anything does exist tbh.

I assume you're looking for a better answer than "slight difference between the amounts of matter and antimatter generated by the Big Bang"?

:(

A team of researchers from the UC Berkeley and Cornell found a surprisingly simple explanation for ʻOumuamua's non-gravitational acceleration:https://t.co/qvMNSECL3A

— World and Science (@WorldAndScience) November 8, 2023

for non-twitter-havers it reads "A team of researchers from the UC Berkeley and Cornell found a surprisingly simple explanation for ʻOumuamua's non-gravitational acceleration" and links to this: https://www.universal-sci.com/article/cause-of-oumuamuas-non-gravitational-acceleration

that surprisingly simple explanation in full:

oumuamua was fart-propelled

as are we all

mostly you tho

i am as god made me, sir (a small object estimated to be between 100 and 1,000 metres (300 and 3,000 ft) long, with its width and thickness both estimated between 35 and 167 metres (115 and 548 ft))

I for one welcome Amaterasu, "one of the highest-energy cosmic rays ever detected".

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/nov/24/amaterasu-extremely-high-energy-particle-detected-falling-to-earth

This article was amended on 24 November 2023 to clarify some of the wording, based on agency copy, that was used in an earlier version regarding the speed of particles.

that copy:

Some charged particles in the air shower travel faster than the speed of light, producing a type of electromagnetic radiation that can be detected by specialised instruments.

idk maybe it's technically correct (mutters something about group velocity or c in a vacuum)

The Amaterasu particle has an energy exceeding 240 exa-electron volts (EeV), millions of times more than particles produced in the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful accelerator ever built, and equivalent to the energy of a golf ball travelling at 95mph.

I would not want to be in its way, but a 95mph golf ball does not seem that cosmically terrifying?

what if that golf ball actually went through your brain?

"In September 2011, it was reported, in a major release by CERN, that a tau neutrino had traveled faster than the speed of light; however, later updates from CERN on the OPERA experiment indicate that the faster-than-light readings were due to a faulty element of the experiment's fibre optic timing system.[12]"

it aint over till…

there he is (avi so-called loeb)

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:myqic77tkmdhmaufgkvj43hr/bafkreiaaeozu3pprjamfowgooewxjhnhelx72rn4lrvpy2hx3n7mqezvna@jpeg

bring back oumuamua

weird gray space dong and name of my wifi network

brb, changing my name to otm

https://earthsky.org/upl/2025/07/Interstellar-visitor-A11pI3Z-Catalina-Sky-Survey-Univ-of-AZ-e1751425662389.jpg

Incoming!

There’s a new object in the solar system headed toward the sun, and it may have come from interstellar space. We only know of two other objects that have entered into our solar system before, ‘Oumuamua and Comet 2I/Borisov. The nature of ‘Oumuamua is still a matter of debate, and the second was a comet from another solar system. And now we may have a third interstellar visitor. Currently named A11pl3Z, this object has a trajectory that suggests it didn’t originate inside our own solar system.

The International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center added the object to their Near-Earth Object confirmation list on July 1, 2025. The object is also on NASA and the JPL website for Near-Earth Object Confirmation Page under A11pl3Z. Despite being listed as a near-Earth object, there is no fear of it hitting Earth or even coming particularly close.

Astrafoxen, an astrophysics undergrad student in California on Bluesky, has shared an image of A11pl3Z from the Deep Random Survey in Chile. Additionally, Sam Deen, a prolific amateur astronomer, found earlier images of the object in ATLAS data from June 25 to 29. These data points help show the track of the object, indicating that it is almost certainly interstellar.

The dim space rock is currently at about magnitude 18.8. Our new visitor, A11pl3Z, will get its closest to the sun – at about 2 astronomical units (AU), or twice as far as Earth is to the sun – in October.

> A11pl3Z

new autechre track dropped

Astrafoxen, an astrophysics undergrad student in California

are we sure he's not riding this thing in?

ilx has not properly welcomed our visitor

― mark s, Monday, 18 December 2017 19:42 (seven years ago) bookmarkflaglink

it's happening again: our third visitor 3i atlas is at perihelion TODAY and weird youtube is going nuts for it, led by the academic grifter avi loeb: https://avi-loeb.medium.com/the-acid-test-of-3i-atlas-at-perihelion-ce131eca8485

tldr: loeb argues that the change in direction would tear a normal comet apart so we must surely expect a kind of space clown-car effect, the main body (which as everyone knows is made of TOO MUCH METAL) firing off all manner of aliens and probes and things of that nature -- except we will see none of this activity in real time because perihelionis taking place the wrong side of the sun, a science fact that loeb believes is CALCULATED AND SUSPICIOUS

shorter me: run come save us 3i atlas clown-car probes

some ppl call it the space clown car
some call it the gangster of love

I find it quite explicable that stuff in the outer depths of the solar system kind of fucks about sometimes in odd ways, that's my paper on this subject.

It's from outside the solar system!

yeah but it's doing all the funny shit (like suddenly changing bearing or speed or whatever) within the Solar System. Otherwise we wouldn't have been able to observe the movements of something that relatively small!

it's from an ancient region of space that predates the solar system by [mysterious visitor voice] "billions of your earth years" , in my opinion the laws of physics simply can't be expected to hold there

Avi Loeb is a crackpot

The comets
Have such a space to cross,

Such coldness, forgetfulness.
So your gestures flake off ——

Warm and human, then their pink light
Bleeding and peeling

Through the black amnesias of heaven.

lovely

oumuamua is the name of my wi-fi network. that is all i have to say.

just spent the last 20 mins or so trying to find out when perihelion actually is or was, but the internet is just a mush of useless AI garbage now

closest to a fact -like claim that can pinpoint is "around 11:47 Universal Time (UT)" -- which i take to mean 11:47am GMT (but this may be wrong) (the internet is also no longer good for fact-checking timezone conversion)

NASA just handwaves it at "around oct 30" but the NASA website hasn't beeen updated for months (im guessing thx to doge)

following ;)

I work at the Mount Wilson Observatory so I checked with some friends up here. Perihelion occurred about 12 hours. 11:47 UTC on October 29. (4:47am here in California)