/sci/ - Science & Math

On 26 October 2018, Avi Loeb and his postdoc Shmuel Bialy submitted a paper exploring the possibility of ʻOumuamua being an artificial thin solar sail accelerated by solar radiation pressure, in an effort to help explain the object's comet-like non-gravitational acceleration. Loeb wrote an article detailing six anomalous properties of ʻOumuamua that make it unusual, unlike any comets or asteroids seen before. A subsequent report on observations by the Spitzer Space Telescope set a tight limit on cometary outgassing of any carbon-based molecules and indicated that ʻOumuamua is at least ten times shinier than a typical comet.