Aliens in the Solar System

 

Sure, this isn’t science fiction but it certainly is close. After all, in science fiction we deal with intelligent life on other planets and alien visitation to Earth, or rather our Solar System. Now, it seems that that visitation has happened.

Harvard scientist, Dr. Abraham (Avi) Loeb, who is the chair of the Department of Astronomy, has suggested that we were visited in 2017. Well, visited isn’t quite the right word but that an alien artifact had entered the Solar System.

Dr. Avi Loeb

In my communications with Dr. Loeb, I asked a number of questions, such as where it might have originated. According to the data, it came from the direction of Vega, which is about 25 light years from Earth.

On September 6, 2017, the artifact crossed into the orbital plane of the Solar System, and on September 9, it made its closest approach to the sun. On October 7, it passed Earth, moving in the direction of Pegasus. Or, in other words, flew by and is on its way somewhere else.

Earth-based scientists were able to study the object, which was about three hundred feet in length, and had a somewhat cigar shape and was rotating slowly.

It was named, “Oumuamua” which means scout in Hawaiian.

It was, at first believed to be a comet, but it exhibited none of the characteristics of a comet. That suggested to Dr. Loeb that it was something completely different.

Dr. Loeb told Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker, “There is a Scientific American article I wrote where I summarized six strange facts about ‘Oumuamua. The first one is that we didn’t expect this object to exist in the first place. We see the solar system and we can calculate at what rate it ejected rocks during its history. And if we assume all planetary systems around other stars are doing the same thing, we can figure out what the population of interstellar objects should be. That calculation results in a lot of possibilities, but the range is much less than needed to explain the discovery of ‘Oumuamua’.”

He also suggested that the civilization that sent out the object might no longer exist. I had wondered about the speed reported as it passed through the Solar System, suggesting a very long flight time to get here. Some the commentators to my A Different Perspective blog suggested that it had slowed as it passed by or that it had arrived via a wormhole. I sort of ignore that without evidence to the contrary but do acknowledge the possibilities.

Nearly all the scientists agree that the object did not originate in the Solar System, which makes it the first alien object to be observed in the solar system. While Dr. Loeb believes that it is an artificial object, many scientists disagree.

In an article published in July 2019, it was concluded, “We find no compelling evidence to favor an alien explanation for ‘Oumuamua’.” 

I, on the other hand, am rooting for Dr. Loeb’s explanation but must note that while the object is certainly alien, it is not necessarily artificial which takes some of the fun out of this.