Prof. Avi Leib claimed following the discovery of the first object that came clearly outside the solar system that it was an artificial object; In early 2021, other scientists proposed the claim that it was a nitrogen glacier that detached from a planet in formation in another solar system. Leib and his research partners published a response article claiming that there is not enough nitrogen in the galaxy to sustain such objects. The debate continued.
By Matt Williams, UNIVERSE TODAY
On October 19, 2017, astronomers first detected an interstellar object (OBC) passing through our solar system. Years and many theories (including the controversial “extraterrestrial solar sail” hypothesis), the astronomical community seems to have arrived at an explanation that fits all observations.
According to the “Nitrogen Glacier” theory, Umuamua is probably fragments from a pluto-like planet in another solar system. In their latest study, titled “The Massive Budget Needed to Explain Umuamua as a Nitrogen Glacier,” Amir Siraj and Prof. Avi Leib (who proposed the extraterrestrial solar hypothesis hypothesis) proposed an official counter-argument to this theory. According to their new article, there is a severe shortage of pluto-like exoplanets in the galaxy to explain the discovery of a nitrogen glacier.
In an article in which he raised the possibility, Leib noted that the unusual character and behavior of Umuamua are consistent with a solar sail. This includes the very reflective nature of the bone and its profile, which appears to be cigar-shaped or pancake-like. And more importantly, its sudden acceleration and deviation from its expected trajectory seem to have been caused by radiation pressure, and this is exactly how solar sails achieve propulsion.
And also important is the way it entered our solar system, which allowed it to fly close to Earth after passing its closest point to our sun. In other words, the dynamics of its orbit allowed it a closer look at the only populated planet in our solar system, which is exactly what we would expect from an asteroid probe. These arguments appear in more detail in Leib’s book “Alien.”
At the time of writing, all attempts to explain Umuamua as a natural phenomenon have failed. Basically, there was no single explanation that explained its clarity, profile and acceleration while acknowledging that there is no evidence of gas emissions. In addition, the sudden acceleration could not be attributed to gravity because these were slowing down Umuamoa at the same time.
In March 2021, two researchers from the University of Arizona School of Earth and Space (SESE) proposed a new hypothesis. In two published studies, research fellow Alan Jackson and Professor Stephen Dash of SESE argued that umuamua may be a sliver of nitrogen ice emitted from a young star system (probably in the Perseus arm of our galaxy) about 400 to 500 million years ago.
In their first article, Jackson and Dash addressed the size and composition constraints of Umuamoa and showed how Umuamoa’s albedo resembles the nitrogen ice on Triton and Pluto. In their second article, they showed how nitrogen ice fragments of this type can be formed by a collision of extrasolar objects that are similar in composition to Pluto and Kuiper belt bodies.
According to their estimates, these collisions produced and emitted around one hundred trillion (~ 1014Objects to interstellar space, half of which will be composed of water ice and the other half of nitrogen (N2). This population will suffice to provide the statistical significance of UFOs needed to explain the discovery of Umuamua. Equally important is the fact that an object composed of N2 Do not produce a tail when approaching our sun, because there will be no water vapor or CO / CO2 Let them take off.
“The Nitrogen Glacier hypothesis is attractive mainly because it explains the non-gravitational acceleration of Umuamua. “Therefore, the appearance (sublimation) of a substance can conceivably drive the observed non-gravitational acceleration of the bone.”
One of the important arguments that Live makes in his proposal article is that regardless of the true nature of Umuamua, his discovery implies a massive population of similar objects in our galaxy. In their contradictory article, recently published in the journal New Astronomy, Siraj and Live address the question of whether there is enough material in the Milky Way galaxy to create such a population of nitrogen glaciers.
The conclusion of Jackson & Dash’s assessment was that there must be a strong population of “exo-plutus” (pluto-like objects) in our galaxy. For this to be the case, the stars for the Milky Way need to have enough material left over from the star formation phase to allow the formation of these dwarf planets. To test this, Siraj and Live took the Nitrogen Glacier model and tested how much stellar matter is needed to make it form such objects.
Prof. Avi Leib responded (to the scientist’s website, not in the original article): “The Umuamua Nitrogen Glacier model does not meet the material balance requirements in several orders of magnitude. A factor of 3 does not solve the mismatch between the model and the data. We recently wrote an article with Tim Huang from Korea showing “A glacier made of nitrogen will evaporate quickly as a result of cosmic radiation. In order to meet the model requirements, the glacier must start from a mass that is at least ten times larger than that reached by the solar system. This exacerbates the mismatch between the model and the nitrogen balance in the galaxy.”
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