When the first sign of intelligent life first visits us from space, it won’t be a giant dish gliding over New York. Most likely it is rubbish from an alien civilization.
Avi Loeb, president of the Harvard Department of Astronomy, believes he has already found some of this rubbish.
In his next book, “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), published Jan. 26, the professor presents a compelling case of why an object that recently entered our solar system was not just another rock but actually a piece of alien technology.
The object in question traveled into our solar system from the direction of Vega, a star close to 25 light-years away, and intercepted the orbital plane of our solar system on September 6, 2017.
On September 9, her trajectory brought her closer to the sun. In late September, it exploded at about 58,900 miles per hour beyond the orbital distance of Venus, and then, on October 7, fired into Earth before “advancing rapidly toward the constellation of Pegasus and the blackness from beyond, ”Loeb writes in the book.
The object was first seen by a Hawaiian observatory that contained the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS), the highest-definition telescope on earth.
The space object was christened ‘Oumuamua’ (pronounced “oh moo ah moo ah”), which is Hawaiian for – roughly – “explorer”.
As travelers went into space, it was relatively small, with a length of about 100 meters, but it posed a major problem for the scientific community.
For starters, it was the first interstellar object ever detected in our solar system. Judging by the trajectory of the object, astronomers concluded that it was not bound by the gravity of the sun, suggesting that it was only traveling.
No sharp photos could be taken, but astronomers were able to train their telescopes on the object for 11 days, collecting rays from other data.
At first, scientists thought it was a normal comet. But Loeb said that hypothesis runs the risk of allowing “relatives to define what we might discover.”
“What if a caveman saw a cell phone?” he asked. “He’s seen rocks all his life and would have thought it was just a shiny rock.”
Loeb soon opened his mind to another possibility: he was not a comet but a discarded technology from an alien civilization.
A number of unusual properties on the object helped Loeb reach this conclusion.
First were the dimensions of ‘Oumuamua.
Astronomers looked at the way the object reflected sunlight. Its brightness varied ten times every eight hours, suggesting that it was the time it took to complete a full rotation.
The scientists concluded that the object was at least five to ten times longer than it was wide, resembling the shape of a cigar.
No natural space body we have ever seen has looked like it, not even close.
“This would make Oumuamua’s geometry more extreme at least a few times in terms of appearance (or width to height) than the most extreme asteroids or comets we’ve ever seen,” Loeb writes in his book .
In addition, “Oumuamua was unusually bright. It was at least” ten times more reflective than the typical solar system. [stony] asteroids or comets, ”writes the author.
Compare its surface with that of shiny metal.
But the anomaly that really pushed Loeb toward his ET hypothesis was the way Oumuamua moved.
“The excess went away from the sun: that was what broke the camel’s back,” he said.
Using physics, scientists can calculate the exact path an object should take and how fast it should travel due to the gravitational force exerted by the sun. The pull of the sun will massively accelerate an object as it approaches, and then expel it from the other side, only to cause the object to decrease considerably as it moves away.
But ‘Oumuamua did not follow this calculated trajectory. In fact, the object accelerated “slightly, but to a highly statistically significant extent,” Loeb writes as he moved away from the sun.
In other words, it was clearly being pushed by a force apart from the gravity of the sun.
At first the explanation seemed simple. Comets show a similar acceleration, as as they approach the sun, their surface heats up and releases frozen gases once, which act as a rocket engine.
These released materials, however, form the distinctive tail of a comet. Scientists carefully looked for this tail or any sign of gases or dust that could propel Oumuamua and it came out empty.
Loeb calculated that, with these and other anomalies, the odds of ‘Oumuamua being a random comet were around one in a trillion, which led him to his box office hypothesis.
But what exactly was it?
A possibility, strange enough, could be found in the technology we already have here on earth.
“Some people don’t want to discuss the possibility that there are other civilizations.”
Avi Loeb, Harvard astronomer and author of “Alien”
About 400 years ago, astronomer Johannes Kepler observed that comet tails blew in what looked like a solar breeze and wondered if this same force could propel rockets through space as if the wind was pushing ships through space. ‘water.
It was a clever idea that scientists now use to develop light sails for probes. Thin, reflective sheets are deployed in space to capture particles coming out of the sun, propelling a ship at high speed through the empty space. Alternatively, powerful terrestrial lasers could be aimed at the sail to make it go even faster.
Loeb, who is involved in a dinghy project to send a small unmanned vessel to a nearby star, said that if Earthlings have thought of this idea, why couldn’t aliens?
He and a colleague shattered the figures and hypothesized that ‘Oumuamua was not actually in the shape of a cigarette, but possibly a disk less than a millimeter thick, with candle-like proportions that would explain its unusual acceleration as it moved away from the sun.
As for his purpose, Loeb is not entirely sure. He speculated that it could be “space junk” that once served as a kind of space navigation buoy used by a civilization a long time ago.
“The only way to look [alien civilizations] it’s looking for garbage, like investigative journalists looking at celebrity garbage, ”Loeb said.
Of course, not all members of the scientific community agree with his theory.
In July 2019, the Oumuamua team of the International Institute of Space Sciences published an article in Nature Astronomy which concluded: “We find no convincing evidence to support an alien explanation for“ Oumuamua ”.
Loeb admits that his theories have raised the eyebrows of astronomers, but is determined about their findings. “Some people don’t want to discuss the possibility that there are other civilizations,” he told The Post. “They think we are special and unique. I think it’s a prejudice that should be abandoned. ”
Loeb said skeptics lean back to assign natural origins to the object and that the explanations they have given to explain its strange properties do not stand up to scrutiny.
For example, some scientists have suggested that “the acceleration of Oumuamua was caused by hydrogen frozen on its surface turning into gas and driving it like a comet, and that hydrogen would have been invisible to the Earth’s infrared cameras, which is why we didn’t detect it.
But Loeb and a colleague published a paper showing that “a hydrogen iceberg traveling through interstellar space would evaporate long before it reached our solar system.”
Whatever the truth, the stakes are high.
The acceptance that an extraterrestrial race has had contact, even through their garbage, would lead to a serious search for more garbage, which would lead us to traverse the Moon and Mars, for example, for debris that could have landed long ago. thousands or millions of years.
And if more evidence is found, terrestrials should start building tools to help us deal with extraterrestrials, such as space treatises and academic fields such as astrolinguistics and astronomy.
But, perhaps most importantly, any other discovery could redefine our place in the universe.
“It would put us in perspective,” Loeb said. “If we are not alone, are we the smartest children in the house? If there were a species that eliminated itself through war or climate change, we can act together and behave better. Instead, we waste a lot of resources on Earth fighting each other and other negative things that are a big waste. ”
Since the appearance of Oumuamua, a second interstellar object known as 2I / Borisov was seen in the solar system by a Crimean telescope in 2019. But that turned out to be a simple old comet.
Until recently, our instruments were not sensitive enough to capture such visitors. But Loeb said the technology will soon allow more space travelers to be located, and the only way to solve the Oumuamua mystery is if a similar object is detected and further investigated with a probe.
He said his book “should motivate people to gather more data about the next object that seems strange.”
“If we find another one and take a picture and it looks like a light sail, I don’t think anyone will discuss it.”