In the 1970’s the famous Arthur C Clarke had published his science Fiction book on the RAMA SERIES The Rendezvous with Rama. It was Sudden discovery of a Space object having entered our Solar System and heading for the Sun. Later it turned out to be a Space Ship obviously made some where else. The story then continues…. ( Clarke’s stories have the uncanny habit of coming true ).
Now In October 2017, astronomers operating the Pan-STARRS1 telescope in Maui, Hawaii, found a bizarre cigar-shaped rock blazing its way through our solar system. Being the first interstellar object ever spotted in our solar system, the scientists named it Oumuamua — a Hawaiian word meaning either “scout” or “messenger sent from the distant past to reach out to us.” Though no one has any idea where it has came from, whether it is an asteroid, or a comet.
It became more mysterious when last year it slingshot around the sun with enough speed to overcome the grasp of its gravity, : It sped up, propelled by some inexplicable force. Initial thought was that it might be an asteroid but unlike the millions of known asteroids in our solar system, this one was traveling so fast — more than 70,000 miles per hour — Voyager 1, the spacecraft that’s currently leaving our solar system, is traveling at around 35,000 mph.
Something other than the gravitational forces of the Sun and planets was affecting it as per European Space Agency, which was tracking the object. When the Hubble Space Telescope spotted Oumuamua in the beginning of January 2018, it was some 25,000 miles ahead of its expected trajectory.
A very simple explanation for Oumuamua’s acceleration may be that Like a comet, it may have been expelling debris and gases from its surface; that would be enough to propel it along like rocket fuel burning off the end of a spacecraft.
However, astronomers saw no visible evidence of these jets. Also confusing: When Oumuamua was closest to the sun, it didn’t break apart like a comet would amid the heat and display a telltale tail. So there’s evidence both for and against the hypothesis that Oumuamua is a comet or comet-like.
In a forthcoming paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters, Harvard professors Shmuel Bialy and Abraham Loeb explain Oumuamua motion by normal phenomena (Loeb is the head of Harvard’s astronomy department) of solar radiation pressure — i.e., the force the sun’s radiation exerts on objects — is a plausible explanation for the object’s acceleration, if it’s the case that Oumuamua is a very thin object.
However at the very end of the paper, they give out another hypothetical explanation: “Alternatively, a more exotic scenario is that ‘Oumuamua may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization.” It’s possible, they suggest, that Oumuamua is a light sail, a type of spacecraft propulsion device.
You can think of a light sail as being like a kite, but instead of being pushed by air in our atmosphere, radiation from the sun propels it forward. Humans have designed these light sails (there’s a pretty gonzo plan in the works called Breakthrough Starshot to develop solar sails propelled by lasers to send tiny spacecraft to the star Alpha Centauri. As The Verge points out, Loeb is the chair of the advisory board for this project.) So you may think, “Well, an advanced alien species might be able to make these things as well.”
Even if this is not an object created by an alien species to be cool. It’s still the first interstellar object we’ve ever witnessed crossing into our solar neighborhood.
And scientists still don’t know if it represents an entirely new class of objects — neither comet nor asteroid — that are hurtling through the galaxy. (Bialy and Loeb argue it does represent a new class, writing it was “either produced naturally, through a yet unknown process in or in proto-planetary disks, or of an artificial origin.”)
“We have no way of knowing whether it’s active technology, or a spaceship that is no longer operative and is continuing to float in space,” Loeb told Haaretz. “But if Oumuamua was created together with a whole population of similar objects that were launched randomly, the fact that we discovered it means that its creators launched a quadrillion probes like it to every star in the Milky Way.”
There are less “exotic” explanations for Oumuamua that are still brain-meltingly awesome. One, as Quanta magazine outlines, is the possibility is that Oumuamua is a shard of a planet that was blown up by a dying star. How cool would that be?
Oumuamua is indeed an odd, alien object. Just probably not the type you’ve seen in the movies.
