The mysteries surrounding the interstellar asteroid “Oumuamua” continue. Now, new calculations suggest that the object may be an alien spacecraft designed to perform interstellar reconnaissance.
This is what Shmuel Bialy and Abraham Loeb, two astronomers at the Harvard-Smitshonian Center for Astrophysics, speculate. In their results, which were published on the arXiv.org platform, they assure that “Oumuamua” was designed by an advanced civilization whose mission was to explore the solar system.
Experts say that the mission of “Oumuamua” has already culminated and that it became a space waste. They also affirm that the asteroid accelerates according to the pressure of the radiation.
“Known objects of the solar system, such as asteroids and comets, have mass relationships of magnitude greater than our estimate for ‘Oumuamua.’ If the radiation pressure is acceleration force, then ‘Oumuamua’ represents a new class of thin interstellar material, either produced naturally, through an unknown process or in protoplanetary disks, or from an artificial origin, “the scientists point out in their research.
In addition, they detail that the object could have the shape of a solar sailboat, which is a method of propulsion for spacecraft complementary to the use of engines.
“Considering an artificial origin, one possibility is that ‘Oumuamua’ is a luminous candle, floating in interstellar space like a rubble,” say the scientists.
But Bialy and Loeb go further, stating that “in a more exotic scenario is that ‘Oumuamua’ can be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth by an alien civilization.”
In social networks the new announcement has generated various reactions from experts, including that of Juan Rafael Martínez, a Colombian astrophysicist who has been working abroad for over eleven years, who says that the speculation of scientists is not supported.
“What the article does is show that the Oumuamua velocity can be explained as the effect of solar radiation pressure and ‘speculate’ on its artificial origin, but nothing indicates that, in effect, this speculation is sustained.”
In addition, he assures that: “That is to say, this article does not show that ‘Oumuamua’ is a piece of artificial origin, it only shows that sunlight is a probable cause of its acceleration, and this can happen to an object of natural origin. as well”.
A rocky object that passed close to Earth dazzled NASA scientists in October 2017, after being seen from the Pan-Starrs1 telescope in Hawaii, and filled with enigmas the space research. Only until the end of November of that year was it established that it was an interstellar asteroid, being the first space rock of another solar system.
“Oumuamua”, as they called the asteroid, which in Hawaiian means “explorer”, is the object being studied and one of them, carried out by Queen’s University in Belfast (Northern Ireland), revealed several findings about the rock that at the beginning was all a mystery.
The research, published by the journal Nature Astronomy, indicated that the object is covered with an insulating layer of organic material that gives a reddish color to its surface.
According to the study, this would mean that the coating could act as a thermal insulator and protect an icy interior, typical of a comet, from high temperatures; that is to say, that it has an icy body of a protective organic bark.
