Avi Loeb

It's sometimes wrong.

And second is that if it were just pockets of ice on the surface of a rock, we would expect the ice pointed at the sun to be heated and therefore the push to be away from the sun because it's the rocket effect that is pushing it the opposite way.

We don't see that.

We see that being pushed to this.

And that could be interpreted.

In fact, I'm working on a paper right now in terms of the symmetric structure of three mini jets that perhaps are in the same plane, and they stabilize an object in the plane perpendicular to the direction of motion.

And then you have the prominent anti-tail that is also contributing.

So altogether, you have a system of jets that gives it a push

not necessarily related to the direction of the sun.

So you don't like the nitrogen iceberg theory?

Well, that was suggested for Oumuamua in the spirit of dark matter, basically saying nitrogen evaporates as a result of being exposed to sunlight, and we might not detect it, because usually we see dust or carbon-based gas molecules, but nitrogen would not be visible, so it's a way of making the tail invisible to us.

Except that solid nitrogen, even if you use all the solid nitrogen that you can imagine from all stars in the Milky Way galaxy, you run short.

There is not enough to produce a large enough population of nitrogen icebergs.

We pointed this out.

It's a simple argument on the mass budget.

And the author of the nitrogen hypothesis got furious and started attacking me personally in any possible way.

Personally?

Yeah.

So including the expedition, including everything, just because we did a calculation of the mass budget.

I mean... Have you paid a personal price or a professional price for speaking out?