Tidal Fragmentation by Close Stellar Flybys: Explaining Oumuamua and a Vast Population of Interstellar Fragments

To the point

Yun Zhang and Douglas Lin propose that Oumuamua is a fragment torn from a larger body by a close stellar flyby, whose elongated shape and lack of coma come from intense heating and crust formation, with buried volatiles released during later encounters causing its non-gravitational acceleration, and their simulations suggest such tidal fragmentation could eject about 100 trillion similar objects per planetary system.