A Harvard professor named Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, believes that the first sign we will get of an alien intelligence will not be spacecraft. He rather thinks that the first sign we will get of extraterrestrial life will be the rubbish of civilization. On January 26, Loeb published a book outlining a case for why a bizarre asteroid that entered our solar system in 2017 was a piece of strange technology.
The object he is talking about was the first known interstellar object that entered our solar system and traveled from the direction of Vega to our solar system. Vega is a star of about 25 light-years, close to the cosmic scale. The object entered the orbital plane of our solar system on September 6, 2017. By September 9, the object known as Oumuamua made its closest approach to the sun and by the end of September, it had traveled past Venus’ orbital distance.
On October 7, it orbited about 58,900 km / h past the earth and moved rapidly to the constellation Pegasus. The object was about 100 meters long and was cigar-shaped. The big splash that made the object was that it was the first interstellar object ever detected in the solar system. Astronomers have come to the conclusion after studying the orbit of the object. They have found that it is not bound by the sun’s gravity, which indicates that it passes through our solar system.
It was initially believed to be an ordinary comet, but Loeb theorized that it could be technology thrown away by an alien civilization. Several observations lead him to the conclusion. The first observation was that the cigar-shaped object was 5 to 10 times longer than it was wide, and scientists have never seen a natural appearance of space look like this.
It was also extremely bright, at least ten times more reflective than typical rocky asteroids or comets. The observation that pushed Loeb to believe it was a disposable technology was the way it moved. He said it had excess pressure from the sun. He said that the sun’s pull will significantly accelerate an object as it approaches, then the object will slow down significantly after passing through the sun and get further away. Oumuamua, however, accelerated from the sun at a slight but statistically significant pace.
Loeb believes that in addition to gravity, it is driven by the sun alone. Loeb and colleagues looked at numbers related to the shape and size of the object and concluded that it was not cigar-shaped, but possibly a disk less than a millimeter thick with sail-like proportions. If it were a solar sail, which would explain its acceleration if it moved away from the sun. Not all scientists agree with this theory and will probably never know exactly what Oumuamua was.