Seems the mystery remains for him.
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/is-oumuamua-a-hydrogen-water-iceberg-a5d815f61c86
Given that `Oumuamua was the size of a football field, it is unclear how a third of its total hydrogen mass can escape from a depth of tens of meters to its surface without pushing out water molecules along the way. Indeed, familiar comets show water vapor with dust. `Oumuamua cannot be a typical comet because it did not look like a typical comet.
As I summarized in a paper published in 2021, `Oumuamua showed other anomalies beyond its acceleration. The variation by a factor of ten in the brightness of reflected sunlight as it was tumbling every 8 hours, implied that it had an extreme shape, most likely disk-like and not cigar-like, according to a detailed analysis of `Oumuamuas light curve in a 2019 paper by Sergey Mashchenko. This disk-like shape, favored at the 91% confidence level by Mashchenkos analysis, is consistent with the flat membrane interpretation.
Altogether, it is fantastic to see the continuing interest within the mainstream of astronomy to explain the anomalous acceleration of `Oumuamua, more than 5 years after its discovery. It is good to have alternative models at hand as we search for the next `Oumuamua with the forthcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
The fundamental question that I am curious about, is whether `Oumuamua was natural or artificial in origin. If the next `Oumuamua appears artificial, then we might feel like home owners who identified all objects in their back yard as rocks, including those tennis balls which originated from the cosmic street and were thrown by our neighbors.
Sometimes, I feel like the kid in Hans-Christian Andersen folktale who suggested that the emperor has no clothes, while the adults watching the procession insisted that the emperor is dressed with fancy clothing. In my case, the emperor is `Oumuamua and the clothes are its invisible cometary tail.