Prospects for Backtracing 1I/`Oumuamua and Future Interstellar Objects
Qicheng Zhang (California Institute of Technology)

TL;DR
This paper evaluates the feasibility of tracing interstellar objects like 1I/`Oumuamua back to their parent stars, highlighting current limitations and future prospects with improved stellar data and increased ISO discoveries.
Contribution
It provides an analysis of the challenges and potential methods for backtracing interstellar objects to their origins, considering current and upcoming astrometric data.
Findings
Backtracing ISOs is limited by stellar astrometry quality.
Current constraints restrict backtracing to within a few tens of millions of years.
Future data and increased ISO discoveries may improve tracing prospects.
Abstract
1I/`Oumuamua is the first of likely many small bodies of extrasolar origin to be found in the solar system. These interstellar objects (ISOs) are hypothesized to have formed in extrasolar planetary systems prior to being ejected into interstellar space and subsequently arriving at the solar system. This paper discusses necessary considerations for tracing ISOs back to their parent stars via trajectory analysis, and places approximate limits on doing so. Results indicate the capability to backtrace ISOs beyond the immediate solar neighborhood is presently constrained by the quality of stellar astrometry, a factor poised for significant improvement with upcoming Gaia data releases. Nonetheless, prospects for linking 1I or any other ISO to their respective parent star appear unfavorable on an individual basis due to gravitational scattering from random stellar encounters which limit…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
