Oumuamuas passing through molecular clouds

TL;DR

This study uses numerical simulations to show that interstellar objects frequently pass through molecular clouds, spending significant time there, especially the younger ones, which impacts their origins and distribution in the galaxy.

Contribution

It provides the first estimate of ISO interactions with molecular clouds and highlights the importance of molecular clouds in the lifecycle of interstellar objects.

Findings

ISOs spend 0.1-0.2% of their journey in molecular clouds in the solar neighborhood.

Younger ISOs (< 1-2 Gyr) spend more time in molecular clouds.

Backtracing ISO origins beyond 250 Myr is challenging due to frequent cloud crossings.

Abstract

The detections of 1I/Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov within just two years demonstrate impressively that interstellar objects (ISOs) must be common in the Milky Way. Once released from their parent system, these ISOs travel for Gyr through interstellar space. While often imagined as empty, interstellar space contains gas and dust most prominent in the form of molecular clouds. Performing numerical simulations, we test how often ISOs cross such molecular clouds. We find that the ISOs pass amazingly often through molecular clouds. In the solar neighbourhood, ISOs typically spend 0.1-0.2% of their journey inside molecular clouds, for relative slow ISOs ($<$ 5 km/s) this can increase to 1-2%, equivalent to 10 - 20 Myr per Gyr. Thus the dynamically youngest ISOs spend the longest time in molecular clouds. In other words, molecular clouds must mainly contain relatively young ISOs ($<$ 1-2 Gyr). Thus the half-life of the seeding process by ISOs is substantially shorter than a stellar lifetime. The actual amount of time spent in MCs decreases with distance to the Galactic Centre. We find that ISOs pass so often through MCs that backtracing their path to find their parent star beyond 250 Myr seems beyond the point. Besides, we give a first estimate of the ISO density depending on the galactic centre distance based on the stellar distribution.