And I really recommend this PBS Space Time Video: ▶ this video He makes excellent points that given historical data, a mm thin solar sail really shouldn't be our first conclusion instead of a collection of rocks that broke apart and refused back together (think of a combination of Shoemaker-Levy and Ultima Thule). And given the short length of time we've been observing space, chances of one of the first things we see enter our solar system be a tumbling, solar sail would mean that interstellar space is chock full of wildly tumbling solar sails! We need to take base rates for probability into account and realize that since most of the stuff we've seen in space is just rocks and most of our models predict just rocks in interstellar space, the probability of it being anything other than just a rock is very low. This whole media obsession with Avi Loeb definitely feels like an example of news organization paying too much attention to the institution an academic works at and not how the rest of their field thinks about their ideas.
in “Oumuamua continues to perplex astronomers a year after it vanished” · View on HN