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.

Comments

Occam's razor

[Crashmarik]

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.

Re:Occam's razor

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Let's see your numbers, bro. From the article:

"Oumuamua shows no signs of a any cometary activity, no cometary tail, nor gas emission/absorption lines were observed (Meech et al. 2017; Knight et al. 2017; Jewitt et al. 2017; Ye et al. 2017; Fitzsimmons et al. 2017). From a theoretical point of view, Rafikov (2018) has shown that if outgassing was responsible for the acceleration (as originally proposed by Micheli et al. 2018), then the associated outgassing torques would have driven a rapid evolution in ‘Oumuamua’s spin, incompatible with observations."

It might have been.

[Oswald McWeany]

It might have been alien, but almost certainly wasn't.

Re:It might have been.

[sheramil]

Did it come from Earth?

No?

Then it's alien.

No intelligent life found

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously it was alien and in search of intelligence and it just passed us by.

Nothing stops it

[jd]

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.