by Cynthia McKanzie

April 29, 2019
from MessageToEagle Website

 

'Oumuamua Could Be

an 'Alien Spacecraft'

'Oumuamua keeps causing controversy and with good reason.

We still don't know the nature of this visitor from a distant corner of the Universe. 'Oumuamua was first detected two years ago, and scientists are still debating whether it's an asteroid, comet or alien artifact.

To complicate the issue even more, a scientist is now proposing,

'it's not the first visitor from outer space'...

Abraham "Avi" Loeb, Chair of Harvard's Astronomy Department has previously suggested 'Oumuamua is an alien "light sail".

Together with Shamuel Bialy, another Harvard Professor, Loeb in a paper (Could Solar Radiation Pressure explain 'Oumuamua's peculiar Acceleration?) for the Astrophysical Journal Letters that 'Oumuamua might have been a,

"light sail, floating in interstellar space as a debris from an advanced technological equipment".

According to Loeb, the object's "peculiar acceleration", suggested 'Oumuamua,

"may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth's vicinity by an alien civilization".

Now, together with undergraduate student Amir Siraj, Loeb,

"thoroughly examined a NASA catalogue of meteors for unusual, 'Oumuamua-like trajectories, and managed to identify a tiny meteor that had burned up in Earth's atmosphere back in 2014.

The space rock of 90 cm in diameter disintegrated above Papua New Guinea, but its inexplicable speed, 60 km/s (134,216 mph), indicated that the object was not bound by the Sun's gravity," Sputnik reports.

In the new study (Discovery of a Meteor of Interstellar Origin), the research team writes that Oumuamua' high speed,

"implies a possible origin from the deep interior of a planetary system or a star in the thick disk of the Milky Way galaxy".

"One would expect a much higher abundance of smaller interstellar objects, with some of them colliding with Earth frequently enough to be noticeable.

 

This discovery enables a new method for studying the composition of interstellar objects, based on spectroscopy of their gaseous debris as they burn up in the Earth's atmosphere", Loeb and Siraj write.

Von Neumann Probe: Hypothetical space probes capable of self-replication.
Is 'Oumuamua an extraterrestrial probe sent here to watch us?

They make it clear 'Oumuamua is not the first interstellar visitor.

"Our discovery also implies that at least 450 million similarly sized interstellar bolide events have occurred over Earth's lifetime.

 

Potentially, interstellar meteors could deliver life from another planetary system and mediate panspermia."

Source

 

Interestingly, the high speed for the meteor discussed here implies a likely origin in the habitable zone of the abundant population of dwarf stars, indicating that similar objects could carry life from their parent planetary systems, scientists write.

Loeb thinks an advanced extraterrestrial civilization could be capable of constructing a probe sent to monitor humanity.

He is not the first one to come up with this idea. Other researchers have previously suggested that a fleet of extraterrestrial probes might watch our galaxy.

The belief that extraterrestrial exist is not far-fetched according to Loeb who thinks 'Oumuamua might be a "message in a bottle."

"I do not view the possibility of a technological civilization as speculative, for two reasons.

The first is that we exist.

 

And the second is that at least a quarter of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy have a planet like Earth, with surface conditions that are very similar to Earth, and the chemistry of life as we know it could develop, "Loeb said in an interview with The New Yorker.