Perhaps one of the most puzzling observations is the presence of a statistically significant ’non-gravitational’ acceleration (i.e. 4.92 ± 0.16) × 10–6 m s−1 (Micheli et al. 2018) (normalized to a distance of 1 au from the Sun), despite there being no evidence of cometary outgassing from 1I/’Oumuamua (Trilling et al. 2018), the most likely cause of non-gravitational accelerations of this kind.

The discourse on whether the object 1I/Oumuamua was artifical, i.e. the non-gravitational force was actually solar radiation pressure (SRP) on extremely thin photonic (solar) sails (Bialy & Loeb 2018), has been mired in bitter controversy. Yet nevertheless it seems to the authors as a hypothesis perfectly worthy of pursuing, in a similar fashion to the hypothesis proposed in this paper, and the consequences derived can then be rejected or accepted accordingly.