What do you guys think it is?

Upon initial observation it would appear to be a rock.

Well, my uncle(who works at NASA) said that all the data they collected on this object points to it being a brake module for some kind of interstellar vessel. Ejecting one or several such brake modules is the most efficient and cheapest way to slow down an interstellar vessel. The path of the brake module(pretty close to Earth) suggests that if there is such a payload on its way, it is aimed for Earth and it wants to actually land, not destroy it. Now, with the knowledge of the smaller asteroid passing the Earth on 9th of November, they are pretty certain that these objects are in fact brake modules. According to my uncle(who is pretty high up in the system at NASA) the governments of the world are scrambling to get in their arks, he's not sure how and where but Elon is certainly involved. Depending on these variables, NASA expects the payload module to land some time before the end of 2017. If another such brake module is observed passing the Earth, it is probably a matter of days or hours before the payload module lands on Earth. Keep your shotguns ready.

It's fucking mystifying to me that they didn't name it Rama. I can only assume they weren't aware of the shape when they named it.
Probably, although it's tumbling so isn't it odd that it managed to stay in one piece despite the weird shape? Wouldn't the force exerted on it eventually snap it in half?

It's tumbling pretty slowly. One turn every 7.3 hours.
Not like Rama.

If I believed that's the sort of s*** NASA does, I'd advocate cutting their funding.
Pity this thread will die long before 2018/01/01.
I'd love to hear your "explanation" why nothing happened.

>It's tumbling pretty slowly. One turn every 7.3 hours.

Given the timescales we're talking about that should be plenty fast enough to snap it.

poor aliens :(

a benis :D

where did it come from?

why would they call it Rama? Like the indian god? I dont get it.

...

Listen’s observation campaign will begin on Wednesday, December 13 at 3:00 pm ET. Using the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, it will continue to observe ‘Oumuamua across four radio bands, from 1 to 12 GHz. Its first phase of observations will last a total of 10 hours, divided into four “epochs” based on the object’s period of rotation.

‘Oumuamua is now about 2 astronomical units (AU) away, or twice the distance between Earth and the Sun. This is closer by a factor of 50-70 than the most distant human artifact, the Voyager I spacecraft. At this distance, it would take under a minute for the Green Bank instrument to detect an omnidirectional transmitter with the power of a cellphone.

alien scout probe

I1/'Omuamua U1

You guys will know on Wednesday.

Pray to God that thing doesn't stop when hit with radio.

"Rendezvous with Rama"
Arthur C Clarke SF novel.
Huge cylinder enters the solar system. Variations in brightness show it's spinning fast enough to have 1 gee on the inner surface of its hull.
Obviously, alien spacecraft.
Ship from Earth diverted to meet it and explore the insides.

Yes, object was named after Indian deity.

...

youtube.com/watch?v=qwVJ7FWc4rQ

>suddenly steady high g acceleration and deceleration
>destination Earth
At least they are stopping, r-right?

Imagine if theres a signal, just some random gibberish. It's just floating away, we'll never get the technologies that it has, we'll never ever know what it was. There goes our chances of technological advancement.

The first known interstellar object.

Astronomers would kill to be the first to detect a signal of any kind originating from it.

fuckin retarded aliens for sending the care package this early in our timeline, good riddance

>technological advancement.
That wouldn't happen anyway. Best possible outcome would be a cultural exchange (swapping stories, art, etc)

>Why not?
youtube.com/watch?v=1W7HNqf9S0Q

Alternatively:
Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

books.google.com/books/about/Roadside_Picnic.html?id=AC1ACia5WjwC&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false

>when hit with radio

It got hit with radio long long ago.

>That wouldn't happen anyway. Best possible outcome would be a cultural exchange (swapping stories, art, etc)

There's really no reason to believe a meeting between an extraterrestrial race and a modern western civilization would go down exactly the same way as a meeting between civilized westerners and indigenous savages.

It rotates every 7 hours, at current velocity it will exit our solar system in 20 000 years, so...

That my friends, is a goddamn sasquanch.

I wonder if it will fit in...

>They haven't told us they're aliens yet
We're screwed.

Also, I think thread theme ought to be anything from this band:
youtube.com/watch?v=xlgsv7U0qgg

The fuck is this shit?

>relying on alien gibs
Have some dignity.

All the time we need.

>implying the monolith scene from 2001 didn't actually happen

okay, I guess you're not into .... I'm not entirely sure how to describe them either, actually. 80s ish power metal-ish scifi themed norwegian metal?

youtu.be/1_5frw11ZEM

You know, by the logic of that scene, we should be preparing for a Planet of the Apes style scenario in the future, considering all the crap we let chimps other great apes see.

almost forgot:
youtu.be/LyJf4K23UxA

It's not the genre - they sound like Sabaton on Xanax

We don't actually know it's cylinder-shaped. All we know is that as it rotates, one side reflects significantly more light than the other. For all we know, one side might just have a much higher albedo than the rest.

Well, I'll take the Sabaton compliment. Though I never thought of the comparison myself.

I think this song would fit better if these are aliens with good intentions: youtu.be/vFe2q4zzJTs

Where do you get 20,000 years?
It'll be beyond Saturn's orbit in January 2019, past Jupiter in May 2018.
We couldn't catch it even if there'd been a probe fueled and ready and launched the minute it was detected.

slippery ayys

How are we not all talking about this?

>How are we not all talking about this?

Because spectral data says it looks like a rock and the window for gathering the best data has already passed - unless we send a probe, of course.

A giant alien turd

>The pull of the Sun's gravity caused it to speed up until it reached its maximum speed of 87.71 km/s (196,200 mph)
>It will continue to slow down until it reaches a speed of 26.33 km/s relative to the Sun, the same speed it had before its approach to the Solar System

>On the outward leg of its journey through the Solar System, ʻOumuamua passed below the orbit of Earth on 14 October, passed above the orbit of Mars on 1 November 2017
>It will pass above Jupiter's orbit in May 2018, Saturn's orbit in January 2019, and Neptune's orbit in 2022
>It will take the object roughly 20,000 years to leave the Solar System completely

>appearing to come from roughly the direction of the star Vega in the constellation Lyra
>Accounting for Vega's proper motion, it would have taken ʻOumuamua 600,000 years to reach the Solar System from Vega

We're never going to be able to explore space.

Humans never are, yes. But by the time we have the tech to start sending ships to space, humanity will be long extinct (Or perhaps the better term is "artificially evolved").

Where is quote from?
Everything sounds reasonable except the 20,000 year figure.
The heliopause is about 18 billion kilometers out. Asteroid's hyperbolic excess is 26.33 km/sec, It'll always be traveling _at least_ that fast and nearly in a straight line radially outwards. It ought to cross the heliopause (which I would call "leaving the solar system" in no more than 21.7 years.
Based on Vega numbers it'll be roughly 0.83 lightyears away in 20,000 years.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ʻOumuamua

>artificially evolved
this
our transhumanist half/machine grandchildren with artificial longevity will be able too

OK. They're defining the solar system as extending all the way through the Oort cloud, halfway to the next nearest sun.
I disagree but I understand their argument.

lmao who the fuck thinks it's anything other than an alien spaceship

Everything is always being hit with radio i think he meant a directed focused and modulated radio from earth containing human memes.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System
>The point at which the Solar System ends and interstellar space begins is not precisely defined because its outer boundaries are shaped by two separate forces: the solar wind and the Sun's gravity.
>the termination shock, which is roughly 80–100 AU from the Sun upwind of the interstellar medium and roughly 200 AU from the Sun downwind
>This structure is thought to look and behave very much like a comet's tail, extending outward for a further 40 AU on the upwind side but tailing many times that distance downwind
>The outer boundary of the heliosphere, the heliopause, is the point at which the solar wind finally terminates and is the beginning of interstellar space. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are reported to have passed the termination shock and entered the heliosheath, at 94 and 84 AU from the Sun, respectively

>The Oort cloud surround the Solar System at roughly 50,000 AU (around 1 light-year (ly)), and possibly to as far as 100,000 AU (1.87 ly).
>The Sun's gravitational field is estimated to dominate out to about two light years (125,000 AU)
>Lower estimates for the radius of the Oort cloud, by contrast, do not place it farther than 50,000 AU
>Currently, the furthest known objects, such as Comet West, have aphelia around 70,000 AU from the Sun

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud
>surround the Sun to as far as somewhere between 50,000 and 200,000 AU (0.8 and 3.2 ly)
>The outer limit of the Oort cloud defines the cosmographical boundary of the Solar System and the extent of the Sun's Hill sphere

Probably fake but none the less

>2spooky4me

it's a copypasta from when the shit first got sighted

If it's 400 meters long and tumbling end-over-end, 2.4e-4 radians/sec will produce an acceleration at the extreme end of 1.14e-5 meters/sec^2 or 1.16e-6 Earth gravities. That's less than a 200th of the already minuscule gravity on Deimos.
The dust bunnies under your bed could hold together under that force!

it's just a fucking rock
i wish it were aliens as much as the next guy, but come on
it's just a rock

It is a copy/pasta that has showed up before in these threads, so you don't have to worry about the thread surviving, just make a new thread on January first. (The copy/pasta will probably be modified to claiming before the end of 2018).

It already came and left

>Dimensions: 180×30×30 m

It also has a shitload of spectral types. Must be a ship from "Rendezvous with Rama". We'll miss that one, but there's 2 more on the way. They will just fuel up and keep going.

And it'll probably show the object is circular and flat --- just like the Earth.

You're right, I take Veeky Forums too seriously.

You know how sometimes you shit and look back in the toilet and there's nothing there? Ever wondered where it went?

A long rock in space

>Dimensions: 180×30×30 m

The only time I've seen a spike like that created without being grown as a crystal is when something smacks into something else. In this case, probably a couple asteroids hitting each other. The sheer forces would create something like that.

sPACe BENIs

Looks like a giant space turd.

What if this is the alien equivalent to the Golden Record

HAHAHAHA THOSE ALIEN MOTHERFUCKERS CANT SHOOT FOR SHIT

Guarantee NASA will hit em on the first shot, God bless those nerds.

USA USA USA

Cant you shoot some sort of beam of ionizing radiation at it to see how it responds?

I know theres a different word for it but its how they figured out redshift ?

>changes trajectory once it's past Jupiter and comes back with more force to fucking obliterate us

calling it rn

how? With our super sci-fi lazer cannons?

My understanding of modern technology is that it is about as equivalent as the most advanced technology present in the Godzilla films

arxiv.org/abs/1712.04409

. The photometry of the minor body with extrasolar origin (1I/2017 U1) 'Oumuamua revealed an unprecedented shape: Meech et al. (2017) reported a shape elongation b/a close to 1/10, which calls for theoretical explanation. Here we show that the abrasion of a primordial asteroid by a huge number of tiny particles ultimately leads to such elongated shape. The model (called the Eikonal equation) predicting this outcome was already suggested in Domokos et al. (2009) to play an important role in the evolution of asteroid shapes.

No, the worst signal to get would be
>Hey our species is doomed so we're sending out these probes that contain everything about us. If one of these is on approach to your system please board to access the records. Our only request is that after you capture the probe that you redirect it toward a system that may contain life, to spread the word of our passing. This message will repeat.

I didnt come here for feels

...

An ancient generational ship where the crew has long since died off. Don't expect to detect any rf signals. It is a million year dead ship.

Seriously. What are the chances that an interstellar object would get a gravitational slingshot from our sun unless it was intentionally steered to do just that?

Actually someone wrote a paper on how we could catch it

arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1711/1711.03155.pdf

an asteroid you fucking idiot

If it's artificial, it's almost certainly pollution from an expanding civilization, not a probe. If there is even one other expanding civilization in the galaxy, it is most likely millions of years more advanced, and so is going to expel more junk and debris in its expansion than any natural phenomenon could.

Probably some Elder god's toenail clipping

Interstellar visit to the inner solar system are estimated to happen once a year.

source, this is the first ever observed

Logs in Space

Found this on a NASA FAQ about interstellar asteroids

>Yes, scientists expect to find more interstellar objects, especially when next-generation asteroid search programs come online. They estimate that an interstellar object similar to 1I/2017 U1 passes inside the orbit of the Earth several times a year, but up until now they have been too faint and hard to detect.

And every article I read about 1I/2017 U1 has mirrored that claim. I haven't found any specific scientists who made the claim, but it seems reasonable so I also haven't looked.

And yes, 1I/2017 U1 is the first we have seen. We still suck at this and they don't really stick around for very long to give us a fair chance

The issue here is that the object is orbiting the sun. Whether this is the first time it will orbit the sun or the first recorded time in a long history of having done so, is not determinable.

What if it's a kinetic kill vehicle that missed us and there's more on the way...

What if it's a kinetic kill vehicle heading for Europa

The object is not orbiting the sun. This asteroid will never return after it leaves.