As I suspected. Oumuamua was too strange to be just an asteroid or comet. Scientists actually think the same. Scientists from Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, using mathemathics gave a justified proposal that its artificially made object:
Unfortunately if it was a recon vehicle, can be now only a wreck, and the civilization that made it is long, long dead, so that is why we dont hear from them.
Considering an artificial origin, one possibility is that ‘Oumuamua is a lightsail, floating in interstellar space as a debris from an advanced technological equipment (Loeb 2018). Lightsails with similar dimensions have been designed and constructed by our own civilization, including the IKAROS project and the Starshot Initiative2. The lightsail technology might be abundantly used for transportation of cargos between planets (Guillochon & Loeb 2015) or between stars (Lingam & Loeb 2017). In the former case, dynamical ejection from a planetary System could result in space debris of equipment that is not operational any more 3 (Loeb 2018), and is floating at the characteristic speed of stars relative to each other in the Solar neighborhood. This would account for the various anomalies of ‘Oumuamua, such as the unusual geometry inferred from its lightcurve (Meech et al. 2017; Fraser et al. 2018; Drahus et al. 2018; Belton et al. 2018), its low thermal emission, suggesting high reflectivity (Trilling et al. 2018), and its deviation from a Keplerian orbit (Micheli et al. 2018) without any sign of a cometary tail (Meech et al. 2017; Knight et al. 2017; Jewitt et al. 2017; Ye et al. 2017; Fitzsimmons et al. 2017) or spin-up torques.
Alternatively, a more exotic scenario is that ‘Oumuamua may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization. Based on the PAN-STARRS1 survey characteristics, and assuming natural origins following random trajectories, Do et al. (2018) derived that the interstellar number density of ‘Oumuamua-like objects should be extremely high, ∼ 2×1015 pc−3, equivalent to ∼ 1015 ejected planetisimals per star, and a factor of 100 to 108 larger than predicted by theoretical models (Moro-Martin et al. 2009). This discrepancy is readily solved if ‘Oumuamua does not follow a random trajectory but is rather a targeted probe. Interestingly, ‘Oumuamua’s entry velocity is found to be extremely close to the velocity of the Local Standard of Rest, in a kinematic region that is occcupied by less than 1 to 500 stars.
All of what you quoted is speculation.
The only evidence there is for aliens, is that it can’t be dis-proven at this point. However, there are no data that DEFINITIVELY proves that it is alien tech either.
So taken from that, what is most likely?
A weird ancient comet/meteorite, stumbling through space.
Or a targeted probe that was sent from another starsystem? Okay…
Lets go with the second one for a sec.
Closest star to our solarsytem is Proxima Centauri at 4.35ly.
Oumuamua was traveling at 26 km/s compared to the interstellar medium.
That gives a traveltime from Proxima Cen. of 47222 years.
It is far more likely to be an anchient comet than anything alien.
It is never aliens, until it is.
Aliens are a extraordinary claim, and therefore also needs extraordinary evidence and data.
This paper is a hypothesis where they explore the possibilities for some of the discrepancies there has been observed. Again. This paper is little more than speculation on how to explain these. Interesting speculation, for sure, but don’t let single papers convince you of such mad ideas like alien probes.
Yes, it is a possibility, yeah… But it is HIGHLY unlikely to be of alien origin.
Wait or more papers mate. There will be more.
Until then, Fly safe o7
Come on, what else would you want, to see it crash in your garden while drinking morning coffee?
I personally think its the most plausible explanation, and as we know, life in universe is common, maybe not intelligent at those times we live in, but who knows, maybe it was existing once very near us.
Actually, given what we DO know about the universe, aliens are a virtual certainty, statistically.
You say that like it’s a long time. It’s a cosmic blink of an eye. And that assumes it didn’t slow down at some point. At 4.35ly away, Proxima Centauri is 8.7 years away at half the speed of light, 17.4 years away at a quarter the speed of light, 34.8 years away at 1/8th the speed of light, a mere 69.6 years away at a mere 1/16th the speed of light. If it is alien, it could be 10 million years old. We just don’t know.
No, in all actuallity we should send a probe with a telescope and other data collecting tools to see what it is. Hopefully its not just iron pyrite in a billion to the nth power lucky trajectory that been sling shotted by a dark planet.
From a statistic viewpoint and looking at the dimensions of only our local group, we simply cannot be alone. The real question is where are they and is it possible to get a contact in any useful way. Because an iondrive and optical comunication is still way to slow to do that. Also we should definetly not screaming around in our parts. Since we don´t know a way to going and look after the source of a scream doesn´t mean its impossible in the beginning. And a contact alone can do enough harm that is… Because humans.
Eh really? How do you ‘know’ that? I mean speculating that it is common is not the same thing. Also life s not the same thing as multicellular organisms how common are they? And multicellular organisms are not the same as sentient life, how common is that? And sentient life is not the same as a species who develops technology. And how many of those technological species we know of (us) could build such a probe? None?
So maybe life is abundant. But since we know only one single biosphere and occurrence so far it’s a little bit much to say we ‘know’ something about the abundance and other properties of possible life out there. Wouldn’t you agree?
While this space rock is interesting, I really don’t think it’s any sort of space craft part or otherwise, it may have unusual properties but we just don’t know enough about objects in our universe, so calling it a craft is a little bit tiny bit of a stretch… I think.
Yes, I wrote about life being common, but not the intelliigent type.
Life is sure thing when there are certain conditions met. Its not a chance based thing when you have correct ingredients for it. Considering only amount of G-type stars in our galaxy, and amount of planets that were observed in habitable zones around them in such a short time of Kepler telescope operation, I know that its certain that life is common. Common like in not only existing on earth.
No… I want indisputable proof that it is alien. This ain’t so.
No. In cosmic scales it is a very short time, yes. But for biological life it isn’t. And we have no scientific evidence that suggest that that sort of timescale is a short time for any life-form. It is still longer than 3 times as long as we humans have been building things. 12000 years ago, we where a few million humans on earth.
For a probe to be targeted is highly unlikely.
You are absolutely right. It has a name. The Fermi Paradox.
@Nana_Skalski@Mayhaw_Morgan and everyone else that are interested in extraterrestrial alien science, here is a short playlist of interesting videos.