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Extraterrestrial hunter Avi Loeb has discovered what appears to be an interstellar object using a new detection method.
Professor Avi Loeb, director of the Harvard Astronomy Department, published a scientific article last night with his undergraduate student, Amir Siraj, who could open new frontiers in the quest for extraterrestrial life.
Dr. Loeb, a theoretical physicist born in Israel and a graduate of the Hebrew University, is chairman of the Breakthrough Starshot Advisory Board, a $ 100 million science project that is trying to find extra-terrestrial life. The committee believes that the Earth will not always be present and it is our responsibility to find a backup planet. Hence the search for an extraterrestrial civilization.
In 2017, astronomers discovered Oumuamua, which would be the first detected interstellar object crossing our solar system. Loeb and his team used a massive telescope (weighing 16 million pounds and about 60% higher than the Statue of Liberty) to see if the object could be a piece of extraterrestrial archeology and to listening for any radio bursts that emanated from it.
The Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia is the world's largest fully directional radio telescope. (Photo: Jamiev_03
/
Flickr)
The best way to search for extraterrestrial objects is to use the sun as a street lamp and to search for objects based on their solar radiation. This is how Oumuamua was found. But smaller objects, like those of a meteor, can use the atmosphere of the Earth as a detector. A few weeks ago, Loeb and Siraj were researching a meteor that had been spotted off Papua New Guinea. The fireball had an abnormally high speed and seemed to come from outside our solar system. If it is confirmed, the meteor will be only the second object of this type ever spotted by humans.
"The use of the Earth's atmosphere as a detector of interstellar objects opens up new perspectives for deducing the composition of the gases they leave when they burn in the atmosphere," Loeb explained. "In the future, astronomers could set up an alert system that would trigger spectroscopic tracking observations on the impact of a meteor of possible interstellar origin. … Some d & rsquo; Among them could even represent obsolete technological equipments of extraterrestrial civilizations, which have drifted to Earth's luck, just like a plastic bottle swept to the ground on the bottom of natural shells. "
Never explorer, Loeb believes that we should continue to scrutinize the sky. "Such a search would look like my favorite activity with my daughters when we were vacationing on a beach – namely checking obstructed shells off the ocean." All shells are not identical , and similarly, only a fraction of interstellar objects could be a technological debris of extraterrestrial civilizations, but we should examine everything that enters the solar system from interstellar space in order to deduce the true nature of Oumuamua or other objects of his mysterious population. "
Wanting to learn more, we went to the Loeb office on the Harvard campus. We lit a tape recorder and let him talk about Oumuamua and his quest for extraterrestrial life, which you can listen to here:
The month was busy for Loeb. In addition to this week's discovery, he also participated in the first photography of a black hole. About a decade ago, the professor helped predict the details of the black hole image revealed last week to the international fanfare. "It's an incredible picture," Loeb told The Grapevine newspaper. "The prediction was remarkably close to the shape of the reported image.This confirms that Einstein's theory of gravity is once again confirmed and that gas behaves in the same way as what we we were waiting just before diving into the black hole throat. "
Extraterrestrial hunter Avi Loeb has discovered what appears to be an interstellar object using a new detection method.
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