In 2017, the Solar System was visited by an object named ‘Oumuamua, which came from another star. The unusual properties of this first interstellar visitor led some to suggest it may be an alien spacecraft – but the truth is that its oddness is already teaching us lessons about how solar systems form.
This lecture also considered the prospects of discovering more unusual objects in the Solar System, and what we might do about asteroids that threaten the Earth.
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/sites/default/files/transcript/2024-01-24-1800_Lintott-T.pdf
References and Further Reading
Images of star formation in the Orion nebula are featured here: https://esahubble.org/images/opo9545l/ and seen in context here: https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/1995/news-1995-45.html
A summary of ALMA’s observations of planet-forming disks is here: https://almascience.eso.org/alma-science/planet-forming-disks and there’s a recent review in the 2020 Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics by Sean Andrews: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.05007
The best summary of observations of ‘Oumuamua is ‘here: ‘The Natural History of ‘Oumuamua: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.01910’
For the hydrogen hypothesis, try : Seligman and Laughlin 2020 https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.12932 and Bergner & Seligman 2023: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05687-w
Avi Loeb’s argument that ‘Oumuamua is likely a spacecraft is published as ‘Extraterrestrial’ (John Murray, 2021), but see my review in the LRB: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n11/chris-lintott/flying-pancakes-from-space and a detailed rebuttal by Wright, Desch and Raymond here: https://medium.com/@astrowright/oumuamua-natural-or-artificial-f744b70f40d5
A good overview of the results of New Horizon’s encounter with Arrokoth is given by Keane et al. 2022: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2021JE007068
The remarkable idea that planet formation might be accelerated by interstellar objects is due to Pfalzner and Bannister (2019): https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.04451
Professor Chris Lintott is a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, and a Research Fellow at New College.
Having been educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge and University College London, his research now ranges from understanding how galaxies form and evolve, to using machine learning to find the most unusual things in the Universe, to predicting the properties of visiting interstellar asteroids. He is Principal Investigator of the Zooniverse citizen science platform, which provides opportunities for more than two million online volunteers to contribute to scientific research, and which was the topic of his first book, ‘The Crowd and the Cosmos’.
Professor Lintott is best known as presenter of the BBC’s long-running Sky at Night program, and as an accomplished lecturer. Away from work, he cooks, suffers through being a fan of Torquay United and Somerset cricket, and spends time with a rescued lurcher, Mr Max, with whom he presents the Dog Stars podcast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lintott
https://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/our-people/lintott
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/4jgzzH6CBH7b5K0qblb73nZ/professor-chris-lintott
helen the hare 