English

Implications of evaporative cooling by H$_2$ for 1I/`Oumuamua

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2023-07-19 v2

Abstract

The first interstellar object observed in our solar system, 1I/`Oumuamua, exhibited several peculiar properties, including extreme elongation and non-gravitational acceleration. Bergner and Seligman (hereafter BS23) proposed that evaporation of trapped H2_2 created by cosmic rays (CRs) can explain the non-gravitational acceleration. However, their modeling of the thermal structure of 1I/`Oumuamua ignored the crucial cooling effect of evaporating H2_2. By taking into account the cooling by H2_2 evaporation, we show that the surface temperature of H2_2-water ice is a factor of 9 lower than the case without evaporative cooling. As a result, the thermal speed of outgassing H2_2 is decreased by a factor of 3. Our one-dimensional thermal modeling that takes into account evaporative cooling for two chosen values of thermal conductivity of κ=0.01\kappa=0.01 and 0.10.1 WK1^{-1}m1^{-1} shows that the water ice volume available for H2_2 sublimation at T>30T>30 K would be reduced by a factor of 9 and 5 compared to the results of BS23, not enabling enough hydrogen to propel 1I/`Oumuamua.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2303.13861,
  title  = {Implications of evaporative cooling by H$_2$ for 1I/`Oumuamua},
  author = {Thiem Hoang and Abraham Loeb},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.13861},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

6 pages, 2 figure; Accepted for publication, Astrophysical Journal Letters