Plausible home stars of the interstellar object 'Oumuamua found in Gaia DR2
C.A.L. Bailer-Jones (MPIA Heidelberg), D. Farnocchia (JPL), K.J. Meech, (Uni. Hawai'i), R. Brasser (Tokyo Institute of Technology), M. Micheli (ESA, SSA-NEO Coordination Centre), S. Chakrabarti (Rochester Institute of, Technology), M.W. Buie (Southwest Research Institute)

TL;DR
This study uses Gaia DR2 data and 'Oumuamua's trajectory to identify potential home star systems, finding plausible candidates but noting the rarity of such encounters and the challenges in confirming the origin.
Contribution
It introduces a method combining Gaia DR2 star data with 'Oumuamua's trajectory to identify potential stellar origins, highlighting the difficulty of such detections.
Findings
Closest encounter was with HIP 3757 at 0.60pc, 1Myr ago.
Encounter velocities suggest a binary star origin is more likely.
Current data makes identifying the exact home star system unlikely.
Abstract
The first detected interstellar object 'Oumuamua that passed within 0.25au of the Sun on 2017 September 9 was presumably ejected from a stellar system. We use its newly determined non-Keplerian trajectory together with the reconstructed Galactic orbits of 7 million stars from Gaia DR2 to identify past close encounters. Such an "encounter" could reveal the home system from which 'Oumuamua was ejected. The closest encounter, at 0.60pc (0.53-0.67pc, 90% confidence interval), was with the M2.5 dwarf HIP 3757 at a relative velocity of 24.7km/s, 1Myr ago. A more distant encounter (1.6pc) but with a lower encounter (ejection) velocity of 10.7km/s was with the G5 dwarf HD 292249, 3.8Myr ago. Two more stars have encounter distances and velocities intermediate to these. The encounter parameters are similar across six different non-gravitational trajectories for 'Oumuamua. Ejection of 'Oumuamua by…
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