‘Oumuamua object flying through solar system - alien origin?

[LadyStanley]

Cigar-Shaped Interstellar Object May Have Been Alien Probe, Harvard Paper Claims

The theory is based on the object’s “excess acceleration,” or its unexpected boost in speed as it traveled through and ultimately out of our solar system in January 2018.

“Considering an artificial origin, one possibility is that ‘Oumuamua is a light sail, floating in interstellar space as a debris from an advanced technological equipment,” wrote the paper’s authors, suggesting that the object could be propelled by solar radiation.

<insert "Aliens" meme>

Click to read more...

 

[GBHockey]

Had an unexpected boost of speed as it travelled through our solar system.. In other words, it saw the mess we've made of the planet and how stupid the human species is, and got the hell out of there.

 

[MR4]

Had an unexpected boost of speed as it travelled through our solar system.. In other words, it saw the mess we've made of the planet and how stupid the human species is, and got the hell out of there.

Or maybe they saw how insane we are biologically, we’re poison (oxygen) breathers descended from some Cyanobacteria that happened to land on earth

 

[No Fun Shogun]

Wait, did they seriously just do a "I'm not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens" statement? That seems pretty much a giant grasp for "that acted in a funny fashion, let's wildly speculate!"

 

[Theokritos]

Wait, did they seriously just do a "I'm not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens" statement? That seems pretty much a giant grasp for "that acted in a funny fashion, let's wildly speculate!"

Abraham Loeb (Havard University) in an article in an Israeli newspaper last week:

"The article I published was written, in part, on the basis of conversations I had with colleagues whom I respect scientifically. Scientists of senior status said themselves that this object was peculiar but were apprehensive about making their thoughts public. (...)

At first they said, Okay, it’s a comet – but no comet tail was visible. Comets are made of ice, which evaporates as the comet approaches the sun. But we didn’t see a trail of gas or dust in Oumuamua. So the thinking was that it must be an asteroid – simply a chunk of stone. But the object rotated on its axis for eight hours, and during that time its brightness changed by a factor of 10 (...)

If you average the velocities of all the stars in the region, you get a system that’s called the ‘local standard of rest.’ Oumuamua was at rest relative to that system. (...) To make things clear, only one of 500 stars in the system is as much at rest as Oumuamua. The probability of that is very low. After all, if it were a stone that was simply hurled from a different solar system, we would expect it to have the velocity of its star system, not the average velocity of all the thousands of stars in the vicinity."

The decisive observations that have led Loeb to his conclusion:

The biggest surprise came last June, when new data from the Hubble Space Telescope showed that the mysterious object had accelerated during its visit to the inner solar system in 2017 – an acceleration that is not explained by the sun’s force of gravity. Acceleration of that sort can be explained by the rocket effect of comets: The comet approaches the sun, the sun warms the ice of the comet and the ice escapes into space in the form of gas, an emission that makes the comet accelerate like a rocket. But the observations did not reveal a comet tail behind Oumuamua. Moreover, gas emission would have brought about a rapid change in the rate of the object’s spin, a change which was also not observed in practice (...)

If it wasn’t comet outgassing, what force caused Oumuamua to accelerate? (...) Loeb: "The only hypothesis I could think of is a push from solar radiation pressure. For that to work, the object would have to be very thin, less than a millimeter thick, in other words a type of pancake. In addition, the Spitzer Space Telescope found no evidence of heat emission from the object, and that means that it is at least 10 times more reflective than a typical comet or asteroid. What we have, then, is a thin, flat, shiny object. So I arrived at the idea of a solar sail: A solar sail is a spaceship that uses the sun for propulsion. Instead of using fuel, it is propelled ahead by reflecting light. In fact, it’s a technology that our civilization is developing at this very time."

 

[No Fun Shogun]

In medical terms, there is something known as a "zebra," which is a common disease presenting highly unusual symptoms comparable to a much rarer disease. The lesson being that rather than wildly speculating about a very rare disease, the safer bet is almost always to assume that it's a common disease presenting atypical symptoms.

In other words, if you hear hoofbeats, assume it's a horse, not a zebra.

What was this? I don't have any clue, but that is still a massive leap in logic when the quoted scientist admits that he has no other explanation. What caused this? Don't know, maybe aliens? That's kind of in the same vein as evolutionary biology and when they arrive at a conundrum. How did this form? We don't have an answer yet, but intelligent design isn't the best explanation even if they don't yet have a better explanation.

Maybe it was, almost assuredly it was not. Keep investigating and postulating and running theoretical models.