Paris, France
The passage of a strange fireball through the Solar System in 2017 made some astronomers think that it could be a sign of extraterrestrial life, a controversial thesis but still defended by a prestigious scientist, Avi Loeb, the essay went post this Thursday.
“If I’m right, it’s the most important discovery in human history,” says Avi Loeb, director of the astronomy department at Harvard University.
In his essay “The First Signal of Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life,” this black hole specialist explains how the detection of Oumuamua, a cigar-shaped object that traversed the Solar System at full speed, in October of 2017.
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Detected by the Pan-STARRS1 telescope in Hawaii, Oumuamua – meaning “messenger” in Hawaiian – was 400 meters long and 40 meters wide. Its speed was so high that it could only come from a distant star: it was the first object detected to come from another star system.
After calling it an asteroid, a European Space Agency team estimated that it was most likely a star. But this hypothesis did not satisfy Loeb, since, according to him, it did not allow to explain the excessive acceleration of the object, nor its unusual form, nor the fact that it did not leave behind any drop of gas or dust when happening near of the Sun.
Along with another Harvard researcher, he signed an article in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, advancing the theory that Oumuamua could only be a probe propelled by an extraterrestrial civilization. His publication was widely criticized, but for Loeb the “debate is prolonged due to lack of tangible evidence and it can only be stated that the phenomenon was and remains an anomaly.”
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Over 272 pages, the American-Israeli physicist sets out his hypotheses about “this first unidentified interstellar visitor” and “explores the question of whether we are alone in the universe,” according to French publisher Seuil .
He also advocates expanding the field of research, beyond the study of a possible microbial life on Mars, the target of NASA’s “Perseverance” mission, which will land on the red planet on February 18.