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A physicist has weighed in on the mystery surrounding the interstellar object “ Oumuamua ”, which flew over Earth in 2017 at unusually high speed.
Harvard professor Avi Loeb noticed during an interview with Salon that it is possible that the fast cigar-shaped object is an interstellar spaceship.
“At first, astronomers assumed it must have been a comet, because these are the objects that are most loosely related to stars,” Loeb said. “The problem with that was that there was no comet tail.”
Loeb has written a book on the subject, titled: “Alien: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.” The book is due out next week.
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An artistic representation of ‘Oumuamua, a visitor from outside the solar system. Credit: The international Gemini Observatory / NOIRLab / NSF / AURA artwork by J. Pollard
“Some people say, ‘OK, it’s not a comet, maybe just a rock.’ But the problem is, about six months later it was reported that there was excessive thrust in addition to the force of gravity acting on it by the sun, ”he continued. “It showed extra force. Usually that force comes from the rocket effect of the cometary tail, but there was no cometary tail. So the question was, what is producing this excessive thrust?”
Loeb told the website that another object was discovered that exhibited an excessive thrust called 2020-SO, which he said ended up being a rocket thruster from a failed mission of the lunar lander, Surveyor II. , which was launched in 1966. artificially made and without comet trace, it “provides evidence” that we can tell the difference between a rock and an object – like a rocket thruster – pushed by sunlight.
“For me, it demonstrated that” Oumuamua was maybe artificial, certainly not made by us because it was only a few months near us. We couldn’t even hunt it with our best rockets, ”he told Salon.
Loeb added that it was at “the brightest end of all the objects we have seen in the solar system.”
In November 2018, a study published by Loeb and others at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics suggested that “Oumuamua could be” a luminous veil of artificial origin “sent from another civilization. However, the researcher who discovered ‘Oumuamua, Canadian physicist and astronomer Robert Weryk, said that the idea that he came from another civilization was only “wild speculation”.
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“Oumuamua, which means ‘scout’ or ‘scout’ in Hawaiian, was first classified as an asteroid when it was spotted in 2017 traveling at 196,000 mph. However, it had recently been found closer to a comet.
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NASA has confirmed that it is the “first object ever seen in our solar system known to originate elsewhere.”
Chris Ciaccia of Fox News contributed to this report
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