[astro123]

I read a lot of astronomy journalism that I think is absolutely awful (one of the main reasons I made this account was to point out garbage articles/comments). I actually think that this is pretty good.

It mostly follows the paper (here's what looks like an earlier version of this paper that is easily available [1]), doesn't engage in too much hyperbole, isn't publicizing something widely outside of the consensus.

Disclaimer that I don't work on planetary formation/dynamics so am not an expert on this, but still, pretty impressed.

[1] https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/apophis2020/pdf/2018.pdf

[robocat]

Here’s a 2019 preprint that concludes “We show that cigar-shaped models suffer from a fine-tuning problem and have only 16 per cent probability to produce light curve minima as deep as the ones present in `Oumuamua's light curve. Disc-shaped models, on the other hand, are very likely (at 91 per cent) to produce minima of the required depth.”

https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.03696

So it seems like there is still a lot of conjecture involved... Yet the National Geographic article misleads by showing an artists impression (pictures are truthy) while treating the elongated shape as fact on every line (the alternate disc model was also mentioned in original paper trying to deduct the shape, although the paper concluded it was less likely). Poor reporting IMHO.

I am not an astrophysicist, but this is the second Nat Geo article that I’ve read recently that has really failed my good reporting sniff test. Edit: failed to meet the high standards I expect from Nat Geo.

[laumars]

Did you read to the end? The article does actually make that point:

> But [Bannister] and Laughlin introduce a new wrinkle to the mystery: They’re skeptical that ‘Oumuamua is actually a cigar-shaped object, pointing to a paper published last summer that revisited the original observations of the object. The newer analysis concludes that ‘Oumuamua may actually have a pancake-like shape—a shape that Bannister likens to an overstuffed pita, similar to an object in the outer solar system called MU69, or Arrokoth.

I get your point that the article doesn't promote the significance of the disc-shape analysis enough however my takeaway from the article wasn't that it was claiming the origin of Oumuamua was solved but rather new research has identified potential scenarios where cigar-shaped objects could be naturally created (research which was spurred on by the discovery and mystery of Oumuamua).

If that was what the article intended to cover then it doesn't make sense to cover the disc-shaped analysis extensively throughout the article however for clarity the mention of Oumuamua probably should also have been demoted in at least the title. Sadly I think there's little chance of putting click-bait headlines back in the proverbial genie bottle.