Interstellar Asteroid Rotation with the Mechanical Torque Produced by Interstellar Medium

TL;DR

This study models how interstellar medium collisions can significantly alter the rotation and tumbling motion of interstellar objects like 'Oumuamua over billions of years, highlighting a potential mechanism for their observed tumbling.

Contribution

It introduces a simple analytical model to quantify the impact of ISM torque on interstellar objects' rotation states, demonstrating long-term effects comparable to YORP.

Findings

ISM collisions can cause 'Oumuamua's tumbling motion.

Rotation deceleration timescales are several billion years.

Asymptotic obliquities mostly at 0 and 180 degrees.

Abstract

The first interstellar object 'Oumuamua is discovered in 2017. When 'Oumuamua travels in interstellar space, it keeps colliding with interstellar medium (ISM). Given a sufficiently long interaction time, its rotation state may change significantly because of the angular momentum transfer with interstellar medium. Using generated Gaussian random spheres with the dimension ratios 6:1:1 and 5:5:1, this paper explores the ISM torque curve and proposes that ISM collision may account for 'Oumuamua's tumbling with the simple constant-torque analytical method. The statistic results show that the asymptotic obliquities distribute mostly at 0 and 180 degree and most cases spin down at the asymptotic obliquity, indicating the ISM collision effect is similar to the YORP effect with zero heat conductivity assumed. Given a long time of deceleration of the spin rate, an initial major-axis rotation may evolve into tumbling motion under ISM torque. Using a constant-torque analytical model, the timescales of evolving into tumbling for the sample of 200 shapes are found to range from several Gyrs to ens of Gyrs, highly dependent on the chosen shape. The mean value is about 8.5 Gyrs for prolate shapes and 7.3 Gyrs for oblate shapes. Rotation of asteroids in the Oort cloud might be also dominated by the ISM collision effect since the YORP effect is quite weak at such a long distance from the Sun. Although this paper assumes an ideal mirror reflection and a constant relative velocity of 'Oumuamua, the results still show the importance of the ISM collision effect.