Astronomers race to study interstellar interloper

On a similar vein there's Project Lyra which is a theoretical fly-by mission of ʻOumuamua or 2I/Borisov. The proposed trajectories to catch up are pretty crazy with my favorite being the 2030 launch for a 2052 fly-by that uses Jupiter and a close Sol 10 solar radii!) gravity assist to rocket out of the solar system [0].

It will be interesting to see if we've just been missing these extra solar objects. I have doubts we'll actually do a project Lyra style fly-by though. Funding is going the opposite direction and all.

[0] http://orbitsimulator.com/BA/lyra.gif and https://i4is.org/project-lyra-a-solar-oberth-at-10-solar-rad...

I'd expect this is just the lamppost effect and we'll start seeing lots of these. It means there's no great need to chase any particular one of them, we can almost certainly wait until we're ready, then pick one that is convenient at the time.

It also means that "Oumuamua is an alien craft!" will almost certainly join in the ignoble legacy of "thinking the first instance of a new thing must be ALIENS" once we've detected hundreds of these (or more, depending on how sensitive we can get). You'd really think we'd be over this by now, but apparently not.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but my understand of the alien craft theory specifically for Oumuamua wasn't just because the object itself was new, but that it changed acceleration [1] without apparent off gassing in a way that isn't explained by our current understanding of orbital physics for a natural object.

It's not just "New object, must be aliens!" It's "This thing doesn't fit our understanding of orbital motion for natural objects, aliens is actually a rational, if still unlikely, possible explanation."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1I/%CA%BBOumuamua#Non-gravitat...

There were a number of anomalous characteristics including its shape, acceleration, rotation, origin, and reflectivity.

How do we know they're anomalous characteristics if it's literally the first one we've ever spotted? What is the normal shape of an interstellar comet core?

The same as the ones from this system. Borisov had the same characteristics.

> The same as the ones from this system.

Why would we assume non-interstellar comets are always the same as interstellar comets? Conditions obviously are a little different when something is ejected from a system and then spends millions of years in interstellar space.

> Borisov had the same characteristics.

We have a sample size of three thus far. Making conclusions right now is like saying all extrasolar planets are large gas giants because the first three were.