Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What Was Oumuamua?

Episode Date: March 19, 2019

 What was that strange rock that passed through our solar system in 2017? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. It's important that we just reassure people that they're not alone, and there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, Season 2, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. One Tribe, save my life twice. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, it's Honey German, and I'm back with season two of my podcast.

Grasias, come again. We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment with interviews with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah.

We'll talk about all that's viral and trending with a little bit of time. chisement and a whole lot of laughs. And of course, the great bivras you've come to expect. Listen to the new season of Dacias Come Again on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, Daniel, do you ever think about what it would be like if we were visited by aliens? Oh my God, I think about that all the time. Do you really? What do you think would happen? Well, in my imagination. it always starts the same way. There's some sleepy guy in front of a terminal somewhere

where it starts to blink and then annoy him and wake him up and he looks it up and he rubs his face and he goes, hmm, that's weird. Isn't that what happens in like every single science fiction movie ever? Yeah, exactly. And, you know, the cool thing is that it's actually happened a few times in real life. Yeah, that's right. Didn't it happen just last year?

Yeah, it happened last year. It also happened in the 70s when we got a weird signal from space called the wow signal. So sometimes we do see weird things coming out of us from space. But it happened as recently as last year. Yeah, that's right, last year. Was it aliens? We still don't know.

We do know that it was weird. How weird? Unquantifiably weird. Was it Muamua weird? It was more weird than you think. That's what I was looking for. Hi, I'm Jorge. And I'm Daniel.

And welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, explain the universe. In which we try to take everything in the universe, including weird things from outer space, and explain them to you, even if they're inexplicable. That's right. even those unwanted visitors. What do you mean unwanted? I want a visitor. You want a visitor? Yeah. Aliens, come on down here. Tell us all about how the rest of the galaxy works.

Tell us about the rest of the universe. We need some more data. I'm dying to know what's going on out there, aren't you? Enslavis, eat us. You're so cynical. No, it's very likely if aliens arrive that they will just take over and suck our brains out of our noses. But in the short intermission

before that happens, they might grant us some knowledge about the universe. And, you know, It could be worth it. You would trade it. You would be like, I'm all yours. But first, tell me what's up with pie. You know, if I could have absolute knowledge of everything in the universe, yeah, I might be willing to sacrifice my brain for that. You're like, before you make me into a pie, please explain pie to me.

That's right. Exactly. Well, today on the podcast, we are going to talk about a visitor to our solar system, one that not a single scientist can really explain. That's right. Last year of 2017, actually, a strange object passed through our solar systems from somewhere very far away, somewhere unknown,

and there's a lot of weird things about it, things that we can't quite explain. So it's the opportunity to learn something about other parts of the universe. It's a very suspicious object, right? Yeah, I don't think you need to view it with suspicion. I mean, it's strange, it's unusual, it's weird, we don't understand it.

But I see it's an opportunity. I mean, it's like, we've been looking out into the stars for decades, trying to learn about the rest of the universe just by looking, right? Wouldn't it be awesome if some of the rest of the universe came to us so we could just, like, you know, hold it and play with it? Like, the same reason we want to get rocks from the moon and rocks from Mars. Wouldn't you love rocks from alien planets in other galaxies or other solar systems? Yeah, so you're saying it's more like conspicuous rather than suspicious. That's right. Yeah, it's conspicuously suspicious.

Or suspiciously conspicuous. Still a mystery. And probably not omniscient, but it hasn't answered any of our questions yet. So we have a lot of questions about this weird rock from outer space. That's right. Today on the podcast, we'll be talking about... Oh, Muwa, Muwa.

Oh, mua, mua. What is it? Where did it come from? Where is it going? Why did it stop by our solar system? Isn't it Hawaiian? Maybe it just likes Hawaiian pizza, I don't know No, the name comes from a word in the Hawaiian language, right?

Omuamua means scout or like distant messenger or something. It's sort of a funny name. But be careful how you pronounce it because it starts out with a letter that's not really a letter. It's like this, you write it as an apostrophe, it's a glottal stop. So I'm not even sure how officially to pronounce this thing. So not only is the rock weird, but the word for the rock, is, like, difficult to understand. Hmm.

We should do a whole podcast on glottal stops. On who names these things anyway. It's sort of a noble name. It's supposed to be a noble name. It's sort of like an explorer of the stars, right? Yeah, exactly. So it's got that positive light on. It's not like invader and destroyer of worlds or anything.

Yeah. Although scout, that makes me think of, like, an advanced scout, you know, like a reconnaissance. Are you worried that aliens are going to invade and eat you? Yes. So, yes, so this weird rock, Omuamu, appeared in 2017, and we are still struggling to understand it, where it came from, what it was, why it's visited us, what it means,

was it artificial, was it natural, we still don't really know. And so we thought, let's dig into it on this podcast and tell you all about how it's strange and how it's interesting and all the mysteries that still remain about this weird rock. Yeah, it was in the news a lot last year, right? Yeah, because it passed through and really made waves in the astronomical community.

People were, like, amazed to see this kind of thing. We were wondering how far these waves in the astronomical community made their way into the general public. How many people out there have heard of or knew what is Omuamu? Yeah, was it only astronomers? Was it astronomers plus everybody interested in alien visitation? Or was it everybody on Earth that was captivated by the passage of this strange rock? We were curious. I just want to know how many people can pronounce it or spell it.

That's zero. I already know the answer to that. So as usual, Daniel went out there and asked people on the street, what was Omuamua? Yeah. I asked them, have you heard of Omuamua? And if they answered, yes, I also asked them what they thought it was. Well, here's what people had to say. No, I have heard of that.

Okay. No, I have lots. I'm sorry. I'm not heard of Omuamua. Yeah. I did not. Okay. No. Never heard of it?

No. All right? No. No? No. Okay. Yes. And what do you think it is?

Probably just some kind of space debris. I did not hear about that. No? Okay. I did. What do you think it was? Probably some kind of meteor. I just think it was like a meteor?

Just rock. Yeah. Okay. No, I did not. No, you did? Okay. All right. So about like 50-50, half of the people seem to know or have heard about it.

And half of the people had no idea. Never heard of it. Yes. What do you think of the astronomy community's PR machine? Apparently, it must be better than the aliens' PR machinery. But don't you think they could have done Muamua with it? I think we should stop with the Omuamu Puns. All right, that officially ends the Omuamua Mua Puns.

Yeah, most people had never even heard of this thing, which to me boggles the mind, like what an incredible event to happen and just for people to be unaware of it. You know, it's in all the newspapers and people were talking about it. How can you just go through your normal life and not know that there's a potential alien ship

flying through the solar system, right? I feel like maybe people are jaded, you know, when they see a headline that goes, put possible alien visiting the solar system. People just, I don't know, these days, it's just kind of all part of the noise that goes through people's feet. You mean because the world is so crazy,

that doesn't seem so crazy anymore, or because you see that kind of headline pretty often? Well, I think it's because the headline itself sounds huge, but it's not like on the front page of newspapers or websites. Do you know what I mean? Like it sounds like it should be a huge deal, but obviously people are not freaking out about it. So, you know, I think as news consumers,

you just assume that it's hyperbole or clickbait or something. Oh, I see. Everybody's lying, so everything must be a lie, right? Yeah, that's a bummer. So when aliens actually land, you're going to be like, whatever, you're just clickbait, go away. Well, I mean, it's not on the front page, right? Like, it's not dominating the conversation. It's hard for me to remember because I obviously pay attention to the scientific news, maybe more than the average person.

To me, it was in the front of my brain for a long time. But yeah, maybe for the average person, it was just a minor, interesting thing that astronomers saw. Well, let's break it down for people. So what was this thing called Oh, Muamu. So this is a thing that was seen by a telescope in Hawaii. It's called the Pan Stars Telescope. And it basically just turned on as this gorgeous new telescope. And it was supposed to be looking deep into outer space

and understanding how the cosmos that are evolving and how supernova are exploding and all that's kind of fascinating astronomical and cosmological questions. What makes a telescope gorgeous? It can see really far into the past. And so to me, that's just gorgeous. Every time we open our eyes in a new way or open a new set of eyes, we see more of the universe. And the universe is beautiful.

I mean, that's purely subjective. But to me, when I look at in space, I see beauty. And so I love when we turn on new eyes and we can see new areas of the universe we'd never seen before. And that's what the Pan Stars telescope allowed us to do. Beautiful way to say it. And so they turned this thing on, and pretty quickly they saw something weird. They saw this rock moving really, really fast into our solar system. And you might think, well, there's a lot of rocks in the solar system, right?

How can you tell that this one is weird? What's weird about this one? The weird thing about this one were its direction and its speed. Wait, so why didn't other telescopes see it? Why did it require this brand new, gorgeous telescope? Well, this is one of the more powerful telescopes we have. I think other telescopes could have seen it. There's also just a little bit of luck in who spots at first.

You happen to be looking in the right place. And also you happen to notice it, you know. A lot of times you turn on your telescope and you're looking for thing A and you accidentally discover thing B, but only if you're curious enough, right? If you see something weird in your data and you're like, huh, I don't understand that. What could that be? You could just shrug and say, I don't know, whatever, and move on with your life. Or you could follow it up and try to figure it out. And sometimes that's where the greatest discoveries are made.

You know, that's how Pluto was discovered or that's how pulsars were discovered. All these things were accidents. it's things people saw something weird in their data it didn't just blow off their curiosity they followed it up right yeah that worked out really well for Pluto I think Pluto's legal team is still fighting that battle it's posthumous legal team it's not dead we didn't kill Pluto

no we didn't it's still there that's what the book says so they turn out this telescope and they basically saw stars and things out there, and they saw one of them moving in a weird direction at weird speed. Yeah, and there's a lot of weird things out there, right? We have planets in our solar system, we have asteroids,

we have a lot of asteroids. We even have comets, right? And comets move differently. But everything in the solar system shares one feature, which is they're moving around the sun. They're gravitationally bound by the sun. They're in a stable orbit. So even comets that come in every 100 years

and then zoom out really far, they're still moving around the sun, right? The focus of their orbit is the sun. And this object was moving in a way that's totally inconsistent with being in an orbit around the sun, any orbit, right? It was going way too fast in the wrong direction. You mean we've never seen an asteroid or anything else that wasn't revolving around our sun. Is that what you're saying? That's exactly what I'm saying. We've never seen anything that wasn't gravitationally bound to the sun. This is the first time we've seen something that looks like it came from another sun. And we could tell just by the motion, right?

There's no information. We'll talk later about what it looks like and how weird it is and the shape of it. But just from its motion, we could tell that it didn't come from our solar system. Because it was moving too fast or in a weird trajectory? Or what do you mean? Both. It was moving in a trajectory that made it clear it was not going to stick around, right? They saw it moving and they could plot its speed and its direction.

So they could tell where it was going to go. and they could tell it was just going to go right through our solar system. It wasn't moving around the sun so we could get lots of looks at it. It was just going to pass through once. And how do we figure out how far it was? How do we figure out how far away it is? That's a good question. We did a whole episode about measuring distances to things.

And so I think you can tell how far away things are using parallax, seeing multiple measurements that are spaced far apart, sort of the way your eyes work. And so within the solar system, I think that works pretty well. because things aren't that far away. So you can tell how far away things are by saying how differently they look or how much they move from different viewpoints.

So you have multiple telescopes or you look at the same thing over several days as the Earth is moving. That's a great question. I'm not sure, but that's how I would do it. And it wasn't just moving a little bit fast relative to our solar system. It was maybe something like 26 kilometers per second

faster than we were. Per second, yeah, exactly. That's pretty fast. That's like in a second, wish, you just went 26 kilometers. I wish I could go 26 kilometers per second. Maybe Tesla's can do that. I don't know. The tube.

What is it called? The hyperloop. Exactly. It was basically hyper looping through our solar system. Yeah, yeah, it's fast, right? Like, it's nothing really move that fast in our solar system. Yeah, and even comets that approach the sun, they speed up really fast, and they don't go this fast. Right.

Yeah, so it was moving pretty quick. It's like seeing a freight train coming in your direction really, really fast, and you're like, okay, that thing is not going to stop where I am. It's going so fast. Yeah, exactly. And fortunately, it didn't pass too close to the Earth, or unfortunately, if you wanted us to get a better look. It passed within like 15 million miles of the Earth.

Wow. That sounds like a lot. Is that a lot? You know, it's a significant, it's like 15% of the distance between the Earth and the Sun. So asteroids pass much closer all the time. 15%. From here the Sun, it's 100 million miles.

Isn't it 93 million miles? 93 million miles from here to the sun. Oh, I see. So it's pretty close. I mean, it's not like it went over our heads. Like, it came sort of into this solar system. Oh, it definitely went right through the solar system. Yeah.

I think your freight train analogy is a perfect one. You know, you're in a house and you hear this freight train rumble by, and you're like, yish, that was kind of loud and close and weird. And it definitely didn't stop in your town. It just blew right through, like you weren't even there. Wow. That's frightening. Yeah.

And it's not even that big. You know, the thing is like, it's, we're not sure exactly because we don't have great pictures of it. It was moving so fast and it was so far away that we didn't, that all of our telescopes just see it basically as a point of light. So we have some estimates for its size and its shape based on, you know, how we think it's rotating, et cetera. But the thing was not that big, like the dimensions are like, you know, a few hundred meters in the longest dimension and like tens of meters or maybe 100 meters in the other. so we are lucky to even see this rock you know rocks can fly through our soul system without us noticing them if they don't like reflect light just the right moment so that we can see them from the sun because these things don't glow right they're dark unless they're reflecting light from the sun i see wow okay so let's talk about where it came from potentially or in which from which direction it came but first let's take a break

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And my podcast, Grasasas Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in, like, over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there.

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But the whole pretending and cold, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasas Has Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network On the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Okay, so I read that this object, oh Muamua, apparently came from Las Vegas. That's right. It had a crazy night in Vegas. There's no explanation for why it's so weird. The home of rock and roll, right?

So rocks, that would make sense. And it just rolled on through our solar system, yeah. No, but you're close. It came from the direction of Vega. Right? We can tell its trajectory and we extrapolate back. We're like, oh, what's in that direction in the sky? And the answer is Vega.

Vega is kind of interesting because it's kind of a nearby star, right? Like it's one among the sort of closer stars, right? Yeah, but this thing, even traveling at its high speed, would take hundreds of thousands of years to get here from Vega. So it's close, you know, sort of on a galactic scale, but it's not really close on a, you know, let's go out for dinner kind of scale. So it just sort of came from Vegas, from Vega. Right, and again, we don't know that it came from that system. It's just sort of answering the question, what's in the sky in that direction? You can extrapolate back and say, oh, it came that way, what else is there?

But, you know, Vega was in a different place a long time ago. Everything is rotating and moving and could have gone through that system also from another one, right? We have no idea how long it's been bouncing around the galaxy. Right. And let's talk about kind of how big it was, because it's not like the size of Manhattan, right? Like, it's more like the size of... It's like the size of one skyscraper in Manhattan. Right.

And it's like maybe up to a kilometer long and like, you know, 50 to 100 meters on each side. Wow. So it's about the size of a skyscraper. It's like the Empire State Building just zoom by. Exactly. Or maybe it's the Las Vegas version. Isn't there one of those in Las Vegas? So somewhere between the Vegas Empire State Building and the real Empire State Building

was the size of this strange, mysterious object. Wouldn't that be amazing if we visited it and found that it had exactly the shape of the Empire State Building? That would be pretty odd. That would be Omu Amazing. That would be a great twist ending to the science fiction movie, what he's going to make about this thing. Which started with a guy in a control room looking at a blinking light going, that's weird.

What's the Empire State Building doing there? It's supposed to be in Vegas. I mean, it's not like the size of the moon or it's not the size of, you know, the continent. It's sort of like, well, how big you might imagine a spaceship to be. Yeah, exactly. It's a reasonable size for a spaceship, which led to a lot of speculation, right?

You might be thinking, all right, so it's a rock from another solar system. We got rocks. They got rocks. One of their rocks ended up in our backyard. What's the big deal, right? Yeah. But it's kind of a big deal because we don't expect to see this kind of rock.

What do you mean in terms of its size or its speed or what? Well, these solar systems are really far apart, right? And yeah, we got a bunch of rocks, but most of those rocks are just sort of floating around our sun. And occasionally one of them gets kicked off and floats away. But, you know, to pass right through another solar system is just really small odds. the chances of that happening are tiny based on our understanding of how often the sun sort of loses rocks

and lets them float into interstellar space this should almost never happen right so it's like a rock in our meteor belt these are big rocks but they hardly ever leave the solar system so it's weird that there would be one floating around randomly

that's right and there are rocks in our asteroid belt but there's also this big cloud of icy objects that forms comets called the Uirt cloud, O-O-R-T. And it's a bunch of really loosely held objects from the sun. And that's probably better candidates for how we might lose rocks. Oh, I see. And, you know, they have models

for how often does the sun lose a rock? And so they can calculate if other suns are losing rocks about the same level, how often should we see one of these things? And, you know, they did the calculation and they're like, you know, if you turn on the Pan Stars telescope, what are the chances of seeing an extra solar rock, a rock

from another solar system, like within the first few months, and the odds are like up to one in a hundred million. Really? You know, it's just not the kind of thing that happens very often because these other solar systems are far apart. Space is pretty empty. What I mean is, you hardly have to worry about running into a rock if you're going between

stars. Yeah, exactly. You know, it's like you build a golf course and then like a golf ball drops out of the sky and score the hole in one. And you're like, whoa, that's weird. Either a golf balls fall out of the sky a lot more often than I thought, which makes it's not so weird, or something really weird just happened, right? And that's the situation we're in.

And so right there, it's odd, right? Because it can tell you either that we were wrong, that maybe there are a lot more of these rocks than we thought, which is already sort of interesting, astrophysically, right, to hear that space is full of interstellar rocks banging around, or, you know, it was just a really, really rare event. And, you know, rare things happen, right? People do get holes in one, sometimes when they don't expect it. So rare things do happen.

Or it's not just a rock. Maybe it's something else, right? And that's why people dug in to understand, like, what is this thing? What is it made out of? What else can we learn about it? Not only is it rare, but it's also going at a very rare speed or like a very strange speed. Yeah, yeah, exactly. If you take all the stars in our neighborhood, like our star and the nearby ones and the nearest few hundred sort of,

of in our galactic neighborhood and you average all their speeds together you get like you know imagine all those stars are like a sloshing ocean bouncing around you know um you get sort of the average speed of that whole blob right and this thing was going at almost exactly that speed relative to us right which means you can sort of think of it like it wasn't moving it was just sort of floating there in the galaxy and we moved through it what what do you mean well you can think if you think of like our galactic neighborhood is like an ocean, this is like a buoy sort of floating in the ocean, right? And of course

our sun is moving relative to the galaxy. Really? And our, I mean, everything is relative, right? It passed through our solar system, or we passed our solar system over it, are the same statements, right? It's just how you think of the frame of reference. Meaning, like, we are the visitors to it.

That's right. It was just having a nice picnic, and we just sort of stormed on the route. We are the freight train. Not it, exactly. And it's a really odd kind of speed because it doesn't help us understand where it came from. Like if it came from the neighboring star, we would expect it to roughly have that star's velocity with respect to the galaxy, right? If it came from another star, you'd expect it to have that star's velocity, roughly. But no stars have this average velocity, right?

Most of them are moving relative to the galaxy. They're sloshing around. So it's a pretty weird speed to have. it's an anomaly kind of like it it's clear it didn't come from possibly the stars around us and so the anomalies start to add up right you're like oh well maybe it's just a rock from another

solar system okay well actually turns out those are really rare you're like all right well rare things happen but the rare things for this rock keep adding up it's rare and weird in so many different totally separate ways that it really makes you start to wonder right and I think the shape has a lot to do

with capturing the public's imagination. Like, you know, if it had been like a ball or like a rock, like a, you know, like a randomly shaped rock, then people would just say, oh, it's an asteroid. But the shape of it was also very, very weird. Yeah, it's like 10 times longer than it is wide, right? It looks like a skyscraper. Right.

They had all these drawings of like cigar-shaped rocks or whatever. And let me just interject a little rant here about astronomy, public relations. every time we hear a story about astronomy, they always include an artist's conception what this thing might look like, right? And sometimes it's labeled very clearly, artist's conception

basically made up, but often it's not. It's just like they have this image that leads the article, and people look at it and they're like, oh, that's what it looks like. But we don't know what this thing looks like. Some artists sat down and imagined, maybe it looks like this. Another artist would have made something totally different.

And so it always frustrates me. I imagine, like, in particle physics can we have an artist's impression of what my data might look like oh come on you guys do that all the time too in particle physics don't you like you know the large hadron collider here is some big explosion with things coming out of it artist rendition those no no that's actual data that's actual data sometimes we take liberties and we like you know hire clever cartoonists to make our stuff look more interesting but we don't make up artist's impression of data like really is that okay no anyway um yes this thing is like 10 times longer than it is wide yeah and that's kind of how a lot of times in movies they picture spaceships right

from alien civilizations like long and skinny kind of like the um the star destroyer in star wars would you buy that kind of spaceship you went shopping for one it makes sense right i mean it's sort of like um it's big but you want it to be streamlined in a way but why does it have to be streamlined There's no atmosphere in space, right? You could have any shape you want. It doesn't have to be basso-dynamic. But was it going? Well, first of all, how did they know it was that shape

if it was so far away and so small? Yeah. The reason they could tell is that the light from it was changing in a periodic way. And so they could tell it had this shape not only because it was weirdly shaped, but because it was tumbling. So this thing is not moving in a smooth way,

like zooming along in the direction of its length. You imagine a spaceship is long and thin. It's zooming sort of in the direction from its back to its front, right? But this thing is not. It's tumbling, right? It's long and thin, but it's tumbling like a tennis racket head over heels, right? It's tumbling around a short axis. So that's not the kind of spaceship you want to ride in.

Maybe it's like a fun spaceship for the aliens, you know? Like the carnival ride. It's fun for about five seconds until you start vomiting in space, which I don't think is very fun. Well, you never know what aliens are into, you know? Maybe that's fun for them. No, you're right. I'm always saying we should broaden our minds to what aliens might be like.

And so, yeah, maybe aliens enjoy vomiting. I think you might be right there. Oh, I see. So the way you can tell a shape, by the way the light, even though it looks like a pinpoint, the way that light from that pinpoint was changing sort of told you that there was something in it spinning and it was roughly this shape.

Yeah, and if something was spherical and it was spinning, then it wouldn't be changing. it's apparent shape to us, right? But if it's spinning or tumbling, it has a long shape, then the part that reflects light keeps changing, right? And so you see more or less and more or less, and that's how they made these estimates. A lot of really good science went into extracting all this information

out of a very small amount of data. Wow. It seems almost fantastical, like an artist rendition. But you're saying, like, if it was a Death Star, circular, it would not, life from it wouldn't vary. Yeah, exactly. it wouldn't vary. And so it's tumbling, which is odd also.

But also the fact that it's so long and thin as unusual. I mean, we look around at the population of rocks in our solar system, you don't see rocks like that. Like, you know, rocks are mostly spherical because of gravity and collisions and stuff like that. Sometimes they get longer and thinner, but like maybe

three to one or five to one, 10 to one, for a length to width ratio is really weird. Okay, and there's other weird things about it. Not just the shape, not just the speed, not just the direction it was going. These mysteries just keep compounding. We haven't even talked about the craziest one.

It gets crazier. It gets so much crazier. Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit more. But first, a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. Parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal.

Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop.

Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro.

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Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So what's the next one? It's very shiny, apparently. Yeah, it's really, really shiny. We're like, what is it, you know? We don't know what this thing is made out of, but based on its size and it's, et cetera,

we know that it's like 10 times shinier than anything in any of our asteroids. You know, like what is this thing? It's so bright. It reflects light so much. We don't know what it's made out of. That's the only clue we have is that it's super shiny.

Our asteroids are sort of mostly like dark gray, right? Yeah, I think they're gray or red based on how much iron or whatever they have in them. But this was a 10 times shinier, so it's like a giant, gleaming, gleaming, silver. Sparkling. Shiny unicorn horn flying through space. I know. It makes you wonder. It gives you the image of a sparkling spaceship, right?

So you've got to wonder. And the thing that makes you think, wow, maybe this thing could be a spaceship, is that as it passed through our solar system so here's the weirdest thing as it passed through our solar system we can track its motion and we can predict its motion based on gravity right

if something is just falling through gravity we can tell how it's going to go but it didn't follow that path it looks like as it went through our solar system it accelerated what yeah I know they hit the gas it hit the gas

yeah it came into our solar system and on its way out it floored it It's like the fright train was going through your town, and then it was thinking, the conductor was thinking, oh, no, I'm not going to stop here, for sure. This crap hole, I'm just going to, you know, step on the accelerator. Yeah, it's like, let's get out of town quick. Let's not exaggerate what's already super weird.

It definitely accelerated. It didn't, like, double its speed. It's a small effect, but it's definitely there. It definitely happened. Like, we can measure it precisely enough to say that there was some acceleration. And it wasn't just due to the sun or it wasn't like the sun was pulling on it or anything. Well, the sun was pulling on it, right? That was the gravitational force.

But it moved in a way that required something else to explain it. It requires the sun's gravity plus an extra push. And that's the question. Where did that push come from? What force did it use to accelerate? Yeah, exactly. And so before you go to like, well, there must have been an engine on it and it was, you know, hitting the gas on the way out, there are some other possible explanations

like maybe it has ice on it and when it came through the solar system that ice was melted and that ice like shoots out and forms a gas and basically forms like a tail like a comet and that can give it a push. Like a rocket like it was um yeah

yeah but a natural rocket not like an engine fabricated in another solar system it could just be like a block of ice on one side that got turned into gas and that's how a rocket would work yeah but they didn't see this gas right yeah they looked We did it really carefully, and the thing has no gas around it. There's no tail, so there's no evidence of any ice turning into gas or anything like that.

So we still don't understand it. Wow. Okay, so in case people missed it, this thing flew by our, into our solar system, very close to the Earth. Yeah, exactly. End of 2017, early 2018. Yeah. This weirdly shaped, you know, too fast, accelerating, shiny, strangely shaped object. that we should never have seen.

That is almost impossible for it to exist. Just went by our planet. It came by, it checked us out, and it hit the gas on the way out. And, you know, you might wonder, like, what are the other explanations for it accelerating? Yeah, like, what's the most likely explanation? We don't have a most likely explanation. Another plausible one is maybe it's really big and flat, right? If it's big and flat, then it can act like a sense.

It can catch sort of the sun's radiation and act like a sail in space. It's called a solar sail. It basically catches a solar wind. So one explanation for the speed, right? But the acceleration. It doesn't explain all those other things. It doesn't explain all those other things. But it could explain the acceleration.

On the other hand, if you're thinking, well, big and flat, that's pretty weird for a rock, right? Yeah, it is pretty weird for a rock. Nature doesn't make big flat sheets of material very often, right? You don't see those in our solar system. What makes that? Well, civilizations, right? So it's fantastic to think about maybe this is a piece of alien junk, right? Maybe this is like space archaeology.

Some ship blew up in a war somewhere a billion years ago, and this is just like a hunk of it flying through space. With some sort of rocket attached to it. No, it could just be a big flat sheet of metal, and it gets a little boost from the solar wind as it passes through, and that's why it's not just moving gravitationally. The acceleration could be explained just if it had that shape. On the other hand, it could have been a purposely designed solar sail, right?

That's a way to get around the galaxy. Build these sails and go from star to star and get a little push as you go by each one. Or you made me think of, maybe it was like a shiny silver surfboard. Like the silver surfer, hello. Yeah, exactly. It's fascinating to think of all the ways that this thing is weird and all the possible explanations that we sort of hope for, right? The ones we want, the stories we'd like to tell. And the thing I love about this object is that it resists conventional explanation.

You try to come up with some explanation you think makes sense. No, well, how do you explain this? And how do you explain that? It's got so many different ways of being weird. Right. Which could mean either is just kind of like a miracle, like this crazy, unlikely event that happened. Or maybe our view of the universe is totally wrong. And maybe we got it all wrong, and it's not that rare for this to happen.

Exactly. So either it's a rare event, and we're just sort of lucky astronomically to get to see it, or as you say, it's less rare than we expect, and maybe we'll see more of them, right? That would be pretty cool. Or it's not a natural phenomenon, right? Maybe it is aliens, right? We can't rule that out. But in any case, it's gone, right?

It went by already. It's gone. If you wanted to know more about it, too late. Yes, it's gone, but it's not too late to learn more about it. I mean, we could potentially build like a fast rocket that takes a slings shot around Jupiter and zooms out there or something. And it takes up to it. Yeah, it would take a long time to catch up to it.

And by the time it did, I mean, it would be like 20 years before it got there and sent us pictures back and stuff. Who knows if we even have a society in 20 years, right? They send data back to the smoking rubble of Western. civilization. That's a cheery thought, right? The better opportunity is just to build a bigger telescope. Oh, to see it. But isn't it too late? Is it already sort of a, I mean, it's leaving at 26 kilometers per second? Yeah, but fortunately, we've been building a really awesome new telescope for the last, I don't know, N years, and it's going to turn on in a few years. It's called the

Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. And it's going to be pretty awesome, and it's going to turn on in about three years. And when it does, it's going to give us pictures like nothing's ever seen. before and it might be able to give us good pictures of this crazy thing. But wouldn't it have been better to look at it when it was going through the solar system? You know, get a good look at it? Yes, it would have been, but we didn't know it was coming, so we weren't prepared. We were lucky we even saw it. Oh, it was short notice.

Yeah, exactly. You know, we saw it when it was already deep into our solar system. It's not the kind of thing we were looking for, right? sets out to find these things because you expect them to never come. Well, that just kind of tells you that on a daily basis, like we are still seeing things about the universe that are completely inexplicable. Exactly. And that's what I love about astronomy and space physics,

that almost every time we look out there into the cosmos, we see something crazy, right? It's full of surprises. There's so many things out there which if we could see them or learn them or if they visited us would blow our minds with the way they change our perspective. about our lives and the universe and how everything works. Yeah.

Well, if you're an alien writing on Omuamua and you're listening to this podcast, we just want to say, hello. Thanks for visiting. Why didn't you stop and say hi? Was it our breath? Thanks for not sucking our brains out of our noses. See you later. Thanks for listening, everyone.

See you next time. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge. That's one word. Or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorpe.com. Do we really need another podcast?

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