CAMBRIDGE, MA — Remember that red, cigar-shaped object that whizzed by Earth last year and sped off, never to be seen or heard from again? Well, researchers at Harvard University, including professor Avi Loeb, chair of the university’s Astronomy Department, now say it could be the world’s first evidence of alien technology.
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The space debris known as “Oumuamua” — pronounced oh MOO-uh MOO-uh — was discovered by the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope trained over the volcano Haleakala on the Hawaiian island of Maui. And it was peculiar for a variety of reasons, leading it to be classified as the first interstellar object known to enter the solar system. For starters, the Harvard scientists noted that based on how it reflected sunlight, Oumuamua was probably much more elongated or flat than any known asteroid or comet in our Solar System.
“We do not have an image of it,” Loeb noted in a document previewing the study. “The information about its shape stems from the variation in reflected sunlight as it spins. Even a thin sheet that is folded as an umbrella might appear from a distance similar to a rotating cigar based on the variation of reflected sunlight.”
In other words, Oumuamua’s tumbling through space was much more consistent with that of something pancake-shaped than a cigar, Loeb told Patch in an email.
Furthermore, the object’s movement suggested it came from somewhere outside the Earth’s solar system. Oumuamua’s motion was about equal to the average motion of material in our corner of the galaxy, Loeb said.
“If I created an instrument whose identity I would like to hide, I would put it at the local standard of rest,” Loeb told Space.com
But the most fascinating tidbit about the mysterious object, Loeb said, was its path.
This to me is great evidence that whatever Oumuamua is it’s not natural and it came from Vega pic.twitter.com/1BerqpjTGv
— Daniel Zylberkan (@danzyl66) November 6, 2018
“Oumuamua deviates from a trajectory that is solely dictated by the Sun’s gravity,” Loeb wrote. “This could have been the result of cometary outgassing, but there is no evidence for a cometary tail around it. Moreover, comets change the period of their spin and no such change was detected for `Oumuamua.”
The object also rapidly sped up multiple times, ruling out any impulsive kick due to it breaking apart. That leaves one other explanation, Loeb said — it was behaving more like the sail of a ship. Sunlight was generating the extra push and the object must be less than a millimeter thick.
“This led us to suggest that it may be a light-sail produced by an alien civilization,” wrote Loeb, adding:”I welcome other proposals, but I cannot think of another explanation for the peculiar acceleration of `Oumuamua.”
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It’s possible the object is a “light-sail” being propelled by reflecting light, Loeb said. This makes sense because the object emitted no heat, meaning its surface is both cold and highly reflective. Humans are already developing this very kind of technology, according to the study, which is scheduled to be published next week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“Lightsails with similar dimensions have been designed and constructed by our own civilization, including the IKAROS project and the Starshot Initiative2,” the authors wrote. “The lightsail technology might be abundantly used for transportation of cargos between planets or between stars.”
It’s not out of the realm of possibility that more advanced civilizations are routinely using this technology, said Loeb, and that this resulted in some type of space debris. But what’s less obvious is why it came so close to Earth, only to zoom off, likely never to return. It could be a defunct technological debris of equipment that is not operational any more, wrote Loeb.
“Radio observatories failed to detect transmission from it at a power level higher than a tenth of a single cell phone,” he noted.
But the researchers also gave another, “more exotic” explanation — it’s actually fully operational, and was sent, in their words, “intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization.” The best case for this is that objects in space follow random trajectories, and the odd trajectory could be explained by simply assuming it wasn’t following a random trajectory — it was a targeted probe.
Researchers will likely never know what the object actually was or why it whizzed by. But the fact that it did lead researchers to suggest we start looking for more of them.
“Such a search would resemble my favorite activity when visiting a beach with my daughters, namely examining shells swept ashore from the ocean,” said Loeb. “Not all shells are the same, and similarly only a fraction of the interstellar objects might be technological debris of alien civilizations. But we should examine anything that enters the Solar System from interstellar space in order to infer the true nature of `Oumuamua or other objects of its mysterious population.”
Read the research paper here.
Photo credit: European Southern Observatory/M. Kornmesser