Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
"The only way it could be worse is if he was chasing it down in a Tesla"
You do realise Elon's Tesla Roadster passed beyond the orbit of Mars last week?
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)
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.'"
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!
How far is SpaceX away from being able to cobble up a flyby probe to at least get a close look at this object?
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)
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"
/. 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...
Size estimates for 'Oumuamua range from 230m to 1000m - 240m being the commonest. Rotation periods are given as 6.96 and 8.1 hours (that's 417.6 and 486 minutes respectively, because my space-station designing toolbox works in RPM). For 230m, the rotation rates give 7.4*10^-07 and -5.4*10^-07 g. For 240m, the rotation rates give 7.7*10^-07 and 5.7*10^-07 g. For 1000m, the rotation rates give 32.1*10^-07 and 20.4*10^-07 g.
So, we can deduce using your argument that the 'Oumuamua-ians developed their physiology in micro-g gravity fields. That's down in the "ISS during tepid manoeuvrers" level.
Nice idea. I don't think it helps though.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
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"