The alien spacecraft that visited our planet in 2017 left a strange message for the scientific community

According to Harvard professor Avi Loeb, an alien spacecraft visited our solar system in 2017 and sent a “message” to the academic community.

In October 2017, Canadian astronomer Robert Weryk made an incredible discovery on any given day.

Weryk spotted a strange elongated object the size of a football field flying through the solar system 300,000 kilometers away, thanks to data from the University of Hawaii\’s Pan-STARRS1 telescope at the Kaleakala Observatory in Hawaii.

The strangest thing was that it seemed to speed up a bit, driven by some unknown power.

Due to its particular trajectory, it passed close to our Sun, which led scientists to assume that the space object, later called “‘Oumuamua” or “explorer” in Hawaiian, was the first visitor from outside our solar system. witness.

Over the past three years, numerous attempts have been made to explain the unique characteristics of \’Oumuamua. Some speculated that it was a hydrogen iceberg, while others speculated that it was a space rock flying through space that had been wrapped in a layer of “organic sunscreen”.

The solution may please Avi Loeb, an astronomer and professor of physics at Harvard University.

Their controversial argument is that \’Oumuamua was a probe sent by an extraterrestrial civilization, an explanation that has received a lot of press and, not surprisingly, has divided scholars.

Loeb examines his fascinating idea in his new book, “Alien: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,” which uses the story of ‘Oumuamua to create the foundation for a much larger conversation:

A fight that must be taken seriously by a scientific community that has long debated the presence of extraterrestrial intelligence.

Loeb stated in an interview with Futurism that “scientists\’ explanations have failed to describe the many quirks and quirks of” Oumuamua. According to him, the scientific community “supported something we\’ve never seen before”.

Loeb\’s “dust bunny” concept theorized that \’Oumuamua\’s peculiar trajectory can be explained by an extremely low density.

“The problem is, I don\’t think a dust bunny the size of a football field would survive a million-year journey in interstellar space,” Loeb said, dismissing that theory. “I mean, I don\’t think it\’s going to stay together.”

Scientific explanations that attempted to insert \’Oumuamua into an existing scientific framework made no sense to Loeb.

“The point is, on the one hand, you can\’t say it\’s natural, and when you try to explain it by natural processes, you end up with something we\’ve never seen before,” Loeb said.

That\’s how it ended up in the hands of the aliens. \’Oumuamua may have been a solar sail sent to Earth from another star system, according to Loeb\’s alien idea.

A solar sail, sometimes known as a light sail, is a type of spacecraft propulsion that converts low-pressure solar radiation into motion.

Earth scientists have already experimented with the concept; In 2019, charity Planetary Society launched LightSail-2, a craft that uses 340 square feet of ultra-thin reflective polyester film coating to gradually propel itself forward.

According to Loeb, the sudden acceleration of \’Oumuamua could be explained by a solar sail powered by starlight.

If not a dust bunny, the astronomer deduced that the interstellar visitor must be incredibly small, likely “less than a millimeter thick” by his calculations.

The conclusion of the solar sail for the astronomer was to follow “footsteps, like detective Sherlock Holmes”. When all other options have been ruled out, the only option left is the truth.

To many astronomers in the field, Loeb\’s conclusion is an exaggeration, as it has often been disputed.

An international team of academics argued in a 2019 paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy that they found “no convincing evidence in favor of an extraterrestrial explanation” for \’Oumuamua.

“Oumuamua\’s attributes are consistent with a natural origin,” University of Maryland astronomer Matthew Knight, co-author of the paper, told Reuters at the time, “and an extraterrestrial explanation is not warranted.”

They claimed that ‘Oumuamua is a “planetesimal” or a small part of a component of planetary construction that has recently passed through our solar system.

Weryk, the man who first discovered the object, had nothing good to say about Loeb\’s theory. In 2018, he told the CBC: “Honestly, it\’s crazy speculation.”

Weryk continued: “I think it\’s a remnant from another solar system.” “It was pure coincidence and we were very lucky to use the telescope that night and look in that direction.”

These rebuttals appear to have strengthened Loeb\’s investigations into the extraterrestrial origins of \’Oumuamua, as well as prompting him to make an impassioned appeal to the scientific community to take SETI research seriously, as reported in his book.

It\’s about reading the stars with an open mind to Loeb.

He told Futurism that modesty is his guiding concept. “If we are not arrogant, if we are modest, we will answer that life as we know it must be ordinary.”

“We now know from Kepler satellite data that about half of the Sun-like stars have an Earth-like planet at approximately the same distance, so it may have liquid water and the chemistry of life as we know it,” he said. Loeb. referring to the “habitable zone” of a star system, which could theoretically support life.