Oumuamua is a mysterious interstellar object discovered in October 2017 by the Pan-STARRS 1 Telescope, located in Hawaii, which initially detected a faint light that appeared to be a small comet.
However, subsequent observations identified that the object was a dark red rock more than 400 meters in diameter, similar to an oval asteroid, but which reached an extraordinary speed of 315 thousand km/h.
Robert Weryk, the University of Hawaii astronomer who first detected it, knew immediately that he was looking at something new to physics.
“Oumuamua may be a fully operational probe intentionally sent close to Earth by an alien civilization,” says a study published in the scientific journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The hypothesis was made by researchers Abraham Loeb and Shmuel Bialy, from the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University in the United States, who believe that Oumuamua may have an artificial origin and that the object, the first of its kind to enter our solar system, could be driven by solar radiation.
The thesis is based on the “excessive acceleration” and the unexpected increase in the speed of the object that traveled through the Solar System between 2017 and 2018.
Before meeting our Sun, Oumuamua was “at rest” relative to nearby stars, which is statistically very rare.
The inexplicable boost that Oumuamua received from the Sun was caused by the reflection of sunlight off its surface, which would need to be thin, flat and reflective to act like the wind driving a boat’s sail. And the object was indeed extremely bright for its small size.
“But of course nature doesn’t make sails. So that’s what led me to suggest that the object might be of artificial origin. Considering an artificial origin, one possibility is that Oumuamua is a solar sail, floating in interstellar space as waste of advanced technological equipment left by some form of intelligent life, waiting to be activated by a star system,” said researchers Loeb and Bialy.
The idea that Oumuamua could have been made by an intelligent alien civilization intrigued scientists at the SETI Institute who pointed their telescopes to observe any radio signals the interstellar object might be emitting.
The scientific project, which included the participation of Stephen Hawking, looked for electromagnetic signals within the celestial body that could not be produced by nature.
Although no evidence to prove that Oumuamua was some kind of alien technology has been found, it is important not to jump to conclusions.
“Scientists have claimed that it is a water ice comet, although we have not seen the comet’s tail. That’s like saying an elephant is a zebra without stripes,” said Loeb.