It led to all sorts of wild speculation- New physics, Modified Newtonian Dynamics…. in the end it had a much more prosaic cause…

Thermal propulsion via the waste heat from the RTG power source…

Given we do not know if it was outgassing, and can only estimate an uppler limit to how much it could have outgassed, and given that we don’t have terribly firm estimates on its dimensions and albedo it seems like any model of how it ‘should have’ accelerated in its orbit would have to include fairly huge error bars given the uncertainties in solar and thermal pressure…

I would love nothing more than to witness evidence of ETI in my lifetime… but jumping to wild conclusions with lack of evidence is only an insult to the intelligence right here on Earth.

Now, if it suddenly had accelerated to 20% of the speed of light in a few hours, and exited the solar system in a column of ionized flame, then maybe we would have reason to suspect an artifact, but it didn’t. It just altered velocity slightly, just like an outgassing comet might. Who knows what caused it, and we already know a natural mechanism that does exactly that.
There’s a lot of things science can’t explain, but that doesn’t mean that everything we can’t explain is a miracle, or an alien action.

Scientists are not lawyers. Scientists believe you are guilty until you are proven innocent. All we can say for sure right now is that there is no convincing evidence to prove, or even suggest, the object was artificial. Now maybe it WAS the mothership, and 2I/Borisov WAS a follow-up mission sent to confirm Oumuamua’s finding. But we don’t know that. In fact, we don’t even know enough to suspect that.

There is a concept in stellar kinematics called the Local Standard of Rest (LSR). It refers to the average speed and direction of stars in the solar neighborhood, and it exhibits a speed and direction due to orbital motion around the galactic center, about several hundred kilometers per second relative to the galactic center. Most of the the stars in the galactic disc within a few hundred light years share this general velocity, implying they are all part of this general rotation.

There are some exceptions to this rule, the so-called “high velocity” stars, a population of stars which orbit the galaxy in random orbits, not as part of the disc population. These stars are part of the galactic halo and we see a few of them flying through the disk at odd angles and high speeds. This population was probably formed during the early history of the galaxy, while the disc stars (like our sun) formed later after the disc stabilized. These stars all seem to be traveling at several hundred km/s relative to the LSR, so from our perspective they seem to be “high velocity”

Most of our neighbors, flowing along with the general drift of the LSR, all appear to be moving at relative velocities in the range of several tens of km/s. This is a minor motion superimposed on their LSR velocities.

The two interlopers we discuss here have moved through our solar system at velocities consistent with LSR objects, plus the little extra speed they might have picked up by falling down the sun’s gravity well. We know they are outsiders because they are moving faster than the sun’s escape velocity, but still at LSR-typical speeds.

It seems unlikely an extraterrestrial civilization would bother launching probes at the same rough velocity as the drift itself. Then again, who knows? Maybe the aliens are in no hurry to get anywhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_kinematics

He makes wild claims unsupported by evidence simply to get his name in the press…

He has been on radio Sputnik more than a few times… that is how cheap a media whore he is…

So what is ‘Oumuamua? The debate continues; speculation is ripe in such a data-poor environment. Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb has used the lack of data to propose that ‘Oumuamua is an alien spaceship. But considering intelligent aliens may be capable of doing whatever they want, this could be an explanation for pretty much any observation.

It seems reasonable that the galaxy is littered with planetoids, meteors and comets that have been ejected from their parent star systems, far away and long ago. And now that we can find them, they will start turning up more and more often. The only thing about this one that is really remarkable is its long, skinny shape–no natural process that we know of could produce an object with this aspect ratio. But we don’t really know that, do we? The only evidence we have for its shape is a light curve, and that could be the result of some unusual set of surface markings or blotches that reflect sunlight that way as it tumbles through space. As for its unexpected acceleration, we’ve seen that behavior in comets, caused by outgassing. 2I/Borisov was a comet, not just a rock, but associated volatiles, too.

Still, the idea that we are visited periodically by extraterrestrial objects is fascinating. Perhaps someday we may travel to one and take a good look at it. And maybe the next one won’t be just a lump of ET slag or a drifting iceberg. Maybe it will be a whole planet. We already have evidence that there may be multitudes of rogue planets, cold solitary worlds, prowling around the yawning darkness between the stars.

Maybe some of you will be here to see it.