Not the third rock from the sun
United States – A scientific paper led by two researchers at Harvard University made a splash this week by claiming that a cigar-shaped rock zooming through our solar system may have been sent by aliens.
The researchers noted in a preprint of the article that it was an “exotic scenario”, but “Oumuamua may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth by an alien civilisation”.
Oumuamua, the first interstellar object known to enter the solar system, accelerated fast away from the sun, hence the notion some kind of artificial sail that runs on sunlight may have helped push it through space.
“Currently there is an unexplained phenomena – the excess acceleration of Oumuamua – which we show may be explained by the force of radiation pressure from the sun,” co-author and astrophysicist Shmuel Bialy said.
“However this requires the body to have a very large surface and be very thin, which is not encountered in nature.”
Their suggestion of an alien force at work went viral. But astronomy experts aren’t buying it.
“Like most scientists, I would love there to be convincing evidence of alien life, but this isn’t it,” said Alan Fitzsimmons, an astrophysicist at Queens University, Belfast.
“It has already been shown that its observed characteristics are consistent with a comet-like body ejected from another star system,” he said.
Katie Mack, an astrophysicist at North Carolina State, also took issue with the alien hype.
“Scientists are happy to publish an outlandish idea if it has even the tiniest sliver of a chance of not being wrong,” she wrote on Twitter. “But until every other possibility has been exhausted dozen times over, even the authors probably don’t believe it.”
Asked if he believed the hypothesis he put forward, Bialy said: “I wouldn’t say I ‘believe’ it is sent by aliens, as I am a scientist. I rely on evidence to put forward possible physical explanations.”
The other co-author, Avi Loeb, chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, said humanity may never know more about the mysterious object, since it has traveled far away and isn’t heading back. –