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Harvard Researchers Suggest Interstellar Object Might Have Been From Alien Civilization (bostonglobe.com)
A strange interstellar object that invaded our solar system and passed close to Earth in the fall of 2017 could have been an artificial object, a piece of a spacecraft from an alien civilization, Harvard researchers are suggesting in a new paper [PDF]. From a report: "There is data on the orbit of this object for which there is no other explanation. So we wrote this paper suggesting this explanation," said Professor Avi Loeb, chairman of the Harvard astronomy department. "The approach I take to the subject is purely scientific and evidence-based. As far as I know, there is no other explanation. You can rule it out or in, based on additional data." He said the study had been accepted for publication in the The Astrophysical Journal Letters on Nov. 12.
The paper, written by Loeb and postdoctoral researcher Shmuel Bialy, suggests the object might be a light sail, or solar sail -- a proposed method of powering spacecraft that uses a sail to catch radiation pressure and propel the spacecraft, just as a normal sail uses the wind to propel a boat. The object 'Oumuamua -- Hawaiian for "messenger from afar arriving first" -- is the first ever observed intruding in the orbits of our planets. It was picked up by telescopes in October 2017 at the University of Hawaii's Haleakala Observatory, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said. It is on its way out of the solar system and expected to never return. Scientists say other "interstellar" objects may have sailed by in the past, undetected.
The object raised eyebrows. It was monitored for signs of radio signals as weak as one-tenth of a cellphone-strength signal, but nothing was detected. Researchers said in December 2017 that it appeared to be a naturally formed, icy object covered with a dry crust. Further reading: Interstellar Visitor 'Oumuamua Is a Comet After All (June 2018), Scientists say mysterious 'Oumuamua' object could be an alien spacecraft, and Cigar-shaped interstellar object may have been an alien probe, Harvard paper claims.
The paper, written by Loeb and postdoctoral researcher Shmuel Bialy, suggests the object might be a light sail, or solar sail -- a proposed method of powering spacecraft that uses a sail to catch radiation pressure and propel the spacecraft, just as a normal sail uses the wind to propel a boat. The object 'Oumuamua -- Hawaiian for "messenger from afar arriving first" -- is the first ever observed intruding in the orbits of our planets. It was picked up by telescopes in October 2017 at the University of Hawaii's Haleakala Observatory, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said. It is on its way out of the solar system and expected to never return. Scientists say other "interstellar" objects may have sailed by in the past, undetected.
The object raised eyebrows. It was monitored for signs of radio signals as weak as one-tenth of a cellphone-strength signal, but nothing was detected. Researchers said in December 2017 that it appeared to be a naturally formed, icy object covered with a dry crust. Further reading: Interstellar Visitor 'Oumuamua Is a Comet After All (June 2018), Scientists say mysterious 'Oumuamua' object could be an alien spacecraft, and Cigar-shaped interstellar object may have been an alien probe, Harvard paper claims.
I'm not saying it was aliens, but...
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
the mothership arrives, then we'll all be sorry for not listening to Dr Quack!
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Researchers said in December 2017 that it appeared to be a naturally formed, icy object covered with a dry crust.
They must be SUPER advanced to cause their object to naturally form like that!!!
Not to be a downer but a far simpler explanation is that it just had an unusual manner of outgassing possibly due to the volatiles being below the surface and taking longer to heat.
It might have been alien, but almost certainly wasn't.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Message to Heavens Gate STOP Pick up delayed STOP Delayed by 19 orbits around your star STOP Thanks, Your SpaceUberPilot R2D2C3PO STOP.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If it deployed a light sail upon leaving the solar system, the sail would be reflecting sunlight back at us now. A sail big enough to accelerate an object of that size would be visible.
Extra-solar, possibly artificial object passes through solar system. Trump declares formation of Space Marines. Coincidence?
Get the tinfoil hats on, boys, the invasion is on the way!
Get Elon to chase it down.
I'll show myself out.
Obviously it was alien and in search of intelligence and it just passed us by.
I don't know but it looked like a giant dump from Omicron Persei 8.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's not science based to say "We can't prove it wasn't aliens, so it might be"
You can't prove god isn't a spaghetti monster either, so I guess you should believe it.
The object is neither long enough or wide enough to hold a multitude of species. Nor was its approach to the Sun close enough to allow the Frozen Sea to melt. Finally, when it dove out of the orbital plane, it never accelerated sharply.
Thus, we can safely say it is not a Raman design. Besides, we didn't have any spacecraft capable of intercepting it and having people explore it.
I don't know if I will believe in the aliens idea, but if it is it may be:
1. A spaceship with hairdressers and Telephone cleaners (Hitchhiker guide to the Galaxy)
2. Aliens looking for intelligent life somewhere and they just by change passed near us.
3. Aleins detected signals around this solar system and were exploring Venus or Jupiter
4. Aliens have found us, and have alreadyy sent down a landing capsule to Earth loaded with explorerer
It's a baby one of these that didn't eat enough.
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/stexpanded/images/a/a8/Doomsday_Machine.jpg
Also, the closer you get to the galactic center the more volatile to life the environment gets. As such, life has more time to grow and advance the further one is from the galactic core
That's quite an assumption. A more violent environment (assuming you meant violent and not volatile) might also be a driving force behind faster evolution.
For example, on earth the great extinctions actually sped up the evolution. Without them (or better: in between them) evolution went relative slow.
Of course, you don't want a bunch of supernova's and gamma rays ionizing any atom on the planet all the time, but a more `challenging` environment might as well speed up evolution instead of slowing it down. We just don't know yet until we increase our current sample size of 1.
(posting as anon as i modded a bit in the topic already)
Fucking stop. Now.
Earth didn't develop complex life until things calmed down here. From our current working sample set (size: 1) it's reasonable to assume that you need a less chaotic environment to develop life. You might need a moon to stir things up, though.
It's just another kind of goldilocks zone.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
One of the papers they rely on heavily (Micheli, et al) states the following:"After ruling out solar-radiation pressure, drag- and friction-like forces, interaction with solar wind for a highly magnetized object, and geometric effects originating from ‘Oumuamua potentially being composed of several spatially separated bodies or having a pronounced offset between its photocentre and centre of mass, we find comet-like outgassing to be a physically viable explanation, provided that ‘Oumuamua has thermal properties similar to comets."
That is, they ruled out solar radiation pressure but that is exactly what this work is claiming to cause the differential acceleration.
If the object starts singing whale songs I'll be concerned, until then it's just another piece of rock flying through space which somehow didn't get trapped in an orbit, and managed to get spoted.
It is unfortunately the first in a gigantic 'caravan' of alien immigrants.
Among them are drug dealers and gang members.
Many are pregnant and will deposit their fertilized eggs on American soil.
The only solution is to build a wall around the entire Earth.
For this reason, God sends them a powerful delusion(operation of wandering)(planet) so that they will believe the lie.
Look it up if you haven't already. Great book.
So did social development. There is a lot of evidence that the sudden flooding of the Black Sea caused a major impulse in civilisation.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Meanwhile the "Ancient Aliens" crowd just orgasmed with this BS.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Earth didn't develop complex life until things calmed down here. From our current working sample set (size: 1) it's reasonable to assume that you need a less chaotic environment to develop life. You might need a moon to stir things up, though.
It's just another kind of goldilocks zone.
The moon actually keeps things calm down here on Earth. Its a self-balancing mechanism that prevents the Earth's movements from doing anything too radical.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
Just saying.
We know its current course and speed, so if you extrapolate into the distant past, does it cross the orbit of any nearby star?
no, you got coast-to-coast am in my slashdot!
It was the classic cigar shaped UFO.
Except for the "having a spaceship that can actually go there" part.
Kah-Meht
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
It was monitored for signs of radio signals as weak as one-tenth of a cellphone-strength signal, but nothing was detected.
Obligatory...
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Shame that the follow-up novels were so bad.
How far is SpaceX away from being able to cobble up a flyby probe to at least get a close look at this object?
"Build a Dyson Wall around them and make the Andromedians pay for it! It's a caravan full of bad bleepniks, believe me! They'll stick their slimy blue tentacles up your family's down-there-parts while you sleep and do harm not covered by lame Obamacare. Bigly sad! #MakeGalaxyGreatAgain"
Table-ized A.I.
Time dilation due to Sagittarius A* is only experienced at extremely close distances to its event horizon. S2, the closest known star to Sagittarius A*, at a distance of ~1000 AU experiences time dilation of less than 0.1% (that's one tenth of 1%)
It would appear that Harvard needs to reconsider its diversity criteria in hiring also, not just admissions.
Not mentioned in the /. summary:
-the object entered our solar system with a greater velocity than could be explained by the gravitational pull of our sun.
-the object accelerated on it's way out of our solar system.
-two possible jets of material were detected emerging from the object.
Also, some scientists have pointed to the tumbling motion of the elongated object as an indication that it was not artificially controlled..... but wouldn't that actually be a great way of reducing possible alarm over a probe's approach?
Just saying.... very interesting set of circumstances.
Perhaps Christians can begin worshiping this thing, at least it showed up and proved its existence within the past 2000 years... a much better track record than this "Jesus" legend.
Anon for obvious reasons, the primitives might throw rocks... historically they have become enraged when questioning why they believe in something with less evidence than Spider-Man... poor fools...
I think this Oumuamua case is more similar to a short story in the collection of "Pirx the Pilot" by Stanislaw Lem. In that an alien mega ship wreck flies right through the solar system but due to general incompetence and lack of attention it becomes too late to give chase while the object moves out at 3rd cosmic speed.
What do you expect from Harvard?
Are we sure real science people are claiming this? or some business or economic "scientific"* researchers, I know that sometimes Harvard should not be taken seriously.
From being just a rock and a spaceship.
If you wanted to fly to the stars, you'd need a ship with a very thick hull to handle galactic background radiation. If you wanted to go slow, you'd also make it a generation ship, which means you need something very large for the population and life support.
That's simply not very practical to build. But why build? Find an asteroid on an extreme elliptical orbit, hollow it out, and use the interior for your ship. Walls already made for you, and you've extracted ore you can use to make floors, engines, etc.
It probably was just a fragment from two planets colliding, but the assumption that it couldn't have been that plus a spaceship is flawed.
The lack of signal isn't an issue. Why would a generation ship transmit signals? Who would it transmit to? Space is very big, after all, and radio is very slow. With walls thick enough to shield against galactic winds, nothing on the inside would have reached Earth.
Only way we could have known for sure would be to have put a lander on it. But there's a distinct lack of space probes capable of such redirected missions. Thank you, American tax payer. Arthur C. Clarke would have been fuming. The good news is that the builders of Rama do everything in threes.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Rama was a Sphere, not a cylinder and was rotating. It had 3 small (compared to it's size) cylinders on a small flat circle, where the entrance/exit was so a ship can wedge against them when docked.
And I do mean yours, not mine. Thank you.
We've essentially been *blind* to objects like this previously.
So this being the first one, virtually guarantees we lack the context and knowledge to "properly" categorize it.
Its shape is weird.
Its acceleration is weird.
Its incoming angle is weird.
Also, it's shape makes no sense as a solar sail?
And it is now out of range of all our observations forever.
Scientists should stick to hypothesises testable with the gathered data.
"We don't know what it is" is much, much better than "Aliens.".
written by a paedo, so logically of no literary merit
Please... take our leader.
There is an awful lot of extrapolation done from the sample of one evolutionary system that we have, and happen to be living in the middle of. And a lot of awful extrapolation.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
This is an irreproducable result that is impossible to test. Hence it's not science. One can make up any sort of supposition in these cases. At best we can only wait for another such occurrence and see if we can collect better data.
-Bob-
Yeah, it's an interesting question. I spent some days on it while working in the Black Sea a couple of years back. As far as I can tell (and I am tens of thousands of hours of experience short of claiming to be an "expert" in seismic interpretation), the data just isn't sufficient to decide if there was one flood event, or many smaller ones. Feel free to upfront the costs for a seabed corer, boat, crew and permission to block the traffic of one of the most congested sea lanes of the world. The permission would be the hard bit. And very expensive.
Oh, by the way, if it happened, it probably didn't affect the development of civilisation in China, India, or Central America very much. Fertile Crescent - much more credible. Egypt, so-so.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Holy mathematical masturbation, Batman! That's a whole lot of complicated looking math for someone who's basically claiming "it was aliens".
It looks sciency though. Doesn't it?
Rama was a cylinder not a sphere. RTF book!
Page 12 50km x 20km.
/. fell for it too. I think Ars has a good write up of the click-bait news cycle on this one. The paper is pages long and goes into great detail. Then on the last line "could be aliens too" and that's all people read.
Bloggers vs Science Writers.
"Predictably, online media go nuts over ‘Oumuamua and Harvard scientists"
https://arstechnica.com/scienc...
Interesting. Of course, we knew that because it hadn't fallen apart in the last several million years of it's flight.
The assumption that the relatively small non-Keplerian component to the course of 'Oumuamua is due to light acceleration from the Sun seems unwarranted, when the possibility of it being due to outgassing remains credible, seems ... well, overblown. IMO. Worth discussing as an option, in the same way that reductio ad absurdam remains a valid form of argument.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
In 5 tones while standing at the base of Devilâ(TM)s Towet.
Wonder how much space cash is on there.
It must be either RAMA or the Ark Ship 'B'...
(posting as anon as i modded a bit in the topic already)
Who cares!
Yeah. Uh, there is a lot of discussion on that suggestion. Whether the seismic (you know, the original data on which the whole proposition is based) actually supports Ryan and Pitman's original interpretation of one catastrophic flooding event remains very much a topic of debate. There are certainly multiple scour channels on the Black Sea side of the Bosphorus, though what the levels of the Bosphorus were for each scouring event is ... very debatable. Let alone their dating, absolute and relative.
Yeah, it's an interesting question. I spent some days on it while working in the Black Sea a couple of years back. As far as I can tell (and I am tens of thousands of hours of experience short of claiming to be an "expert" in seismic interpretation), the data just isn't sufficient to decide if there was one flood event, or many smaller ones. Feel free to upfront the costs for a seabed corer, boat, crew and permission to block the traffic of one of the most congested sea lanes of the world. The permission would be the hard bit.
I thought it was common knowledge that the Black Sea formed from the rupture of the ice dam that held Lake Agassiz waters, at the end of the Ice Age.
The chances that the first interstellar object that we happened to observe being an artificial object are suitably "astronomical". It would be like purchasing your very first lottery ticket and winning the Powerball. I have little doubt that there are aliens traversing the interstellar medium out there somewhere, but it's probably going to be a little while before we actually observe them.
To start with the obvious, IANAA(stronomer).
However, looking at the object's trajectory I find it interesting that it passes so close to the sun - almost as if it was targeted this way.
Of course, if it had passed too far from the sun, we wouldn't have seen it at all. Still, I'd expect interstellar objects within say the orbit of Jupiter to be noticed. However, Oumuamua's closest approach to the sun (at 38,100,000 km) hit a circle less than 1/400 of the area of Jupiter's orbit. It does seem a bit weird to me for the first interstellar object ever observed to get so close to the sun by random chance.
For an interstellar ship, there are however good reasons to pass so close to a star - for example, to use its gravity for an assist, or maybe recharge its batteries.
That is the gist of a proposition published by Ryan and Pitman in 1997. They proposed it on the basis of finding a couple of deeply-incised channels in the sediment and bedrock (their interpretation, not accepted by everyone) near the mouth of the Bosphorous.
But, with more work (seismic survey boats don't come this way very often, and cruising slowly across an extremely busy shipping lane will get you arrested, your vessel impounded, and probably the vessel master appearing in court after several days in a Turkish prison. Imagine trying the same in New York or Rotterdam harbour mouths.), there are more like half a dozen such channels. Some of them penetrate bedrock, some don't and some you just can't tell (got a boat with a saturation or mixed-gas dive spread on board? And permission to dive?). You also can't tell if they happened one after the other, all at the same time, or every decade and a half over a century - which would put extremely different "human scale" interpretations on the events.
Producers of hour-long (less advertising time) TV programmes like nice simple narratives. I'm not a TV producer, and I had several days of "waiting on materials" while bobbing around on a boat in the Black Sea, so I read up on the technical literature on the question, as well as viewing the ROV's pre-operations survey of the sea bed around the location (just in case there was anything archaeological 2+ km below us. Within the shallow-seismic (includes laying pipelines) community and the deep seismic (oil exploration) communities, Ryan and Pitman did not present adequate data to convince the majority of people of their case. Which is not a TV-friendly simple story.
One of "Ryan and Pitman" has stopped writing on the subject - which in science is tantamount to saying "I think I got it wrong that time". The other still raises the subject from time to time.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Each and every time some interesting object up in the sky hits the headlines, you get some fucking retard saying it's aliens. Harvard clearly needs to up their game if they have morons like this on board. This is a fucking rock from deep space. It's not a fucking spaceship, GROW UP.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
"The moon... prevents the Earth's movements from doing anything too radical." Then how do you explain lunacy?