Peculiar Oumuamua Could Be An ‘Alien Spacecraft’ – Harvard Scientists Say

Cynthia McKanzie – MessageToEagle.com – The mystery of Oumuamua deepens. This highly unusual space object raises more questions than answers. Discovered by ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, astronomers announced that the object’s orbit calculations revealed this dark, reddish and highly-elongated beyond any doubt that Oumuamua did not originate from inside the Solar System.

Oumuamua Could Be An 'Alien Spacecraft'

This photo released by the European Southern Observatory on November 20, 2017 shows an artist’s impression of the first interstellar object known to enter our solar system: Oumuamua

What exactly is Oumuamua? Is it an asteroid, comet or “something else”, perhaps of artificial origin? According to one intriguing theory, Oumuamua could be an alien space craft!

Astronomers observed that Oumuamua varies dramatically in brightness by a factor of ten as it spins on its axis every 7.3 hours.

“This unusually large variation in brightness means that the object is highly elongated: about ten times as long as it is wide, with a complex, convoluted shape,” Karen Meech (Institute for Astronomy, Hawai`i, USA) explains.

“We also found that it has a dark red color, similar to objects in the outer Solar System, and confirmed that it is completely inert, without the faintest hint of dust around it.”

According to researchers at Queen’s University Belfast, Oumuamua, the first ever interstellar visitor to our solar system had a violent past.

When Oumuamua was originally discovered, scientists thought it was a comet, then it was later said it’s as a cucumber-shaped asteroid, and now it seems we don’t know what it really is.

NASA thinks it’s unlikely Oumuamua is a comet. Comets accelerate near the Sun because light and other radiation from the Sun push on the gas and dust in the coma, blowing the material away to form a tail that can be millions of kilometers long. The problem with ‘Oumuamua is that it had no observable tail. In fact, we couldn’t see it that well at all.

Oumuamua Could Be An 'Alien Spacecraft'

What did ‘Oumuamua really look like? Credit: NASA/JPL

Two researchers at Harvard University have now submitted a science paper suggesting that this unusual cigar-shaped rock zooming through our solar system may have been sent by aliens. Needless to say their theory caused a stir in the scientific community.  Their paper was accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters and will appear on November 12.

Shmuel Bialy and Abraham Loeb, the authors of the paper argue that Oumuamua’s increase in speed could be due to “solar radiation pressure. This implies, according to the researchers that it’s an alien probe.

“If Oumuamua does not follow a random trajectory but is rather a targeted probe,” the scientists say. “Currently there is an unexplained phenomena, namely, the excess acceleration of Oumuamua, which we show may be explained by the force of radiation pressure from the sun,” co-author and Harvard astrophysicist Shmuel Bialy told AFP via email.

“However, this requires the body to have a very large surface and be very thin, which is not encountered in nature.”

See also:

‘Oumuamua – Interstellar Alien Object That Remains A Mystery

Interstellar Alien Object ‘Oumuamua: Which Of Four Dwarf Stars Is Its Home?

Astronomers Listen For Signs Of Intelligent Life From Unusual `Oumuamua Asteroid

Many astronomers have already made objections against this “alien spacecraft” theory saying there is not enough evidence to make such a claim and “some of the arguments in this study are based on numbers with large uncertainties.”

What we can say with certainty is that despite several presented theories we still do not know the nature of Oumuamua.

Written by Cynthia McKanzie – MessageToEagle.com Staff Writer