Photo: Max2611 (Getty)
They’re out there.
Since you probably don’t stay up to date on what is going up in the skies, we just want to let you know that recently a cigar-shaped asteroid named Oumuamua by its discoverers, flew by earth last month, and now astronomers are set to scan it for signs of alien technology. That’s right, folks. A team of scientists, led by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, are scanning the asteroid and looking for radio signals as they believe this thing could be from an alien spaceship.
The asteroid, which is about one-quarter mile long, had been traveling through space for hundreds of millions of years before it was reeled in by the sun’s gravitational pull. But scientists from Breakthrough Listen project think there’s a chance it’s a spaceship built by some advanced alien civilization.
Here’s what Oumuamua looks like.
Credi: M. Kornmesser/European Southern Observatory
A telescope will now be trained on the object to see whether it’s producing any signals – which would indicate it’s alien in origin – or whether it’s just a plain old asteroid on a solitary path through the heavens. The unidentified object is very thin and elongated. It is bright red and appears to have been blasted by cosmic rays. It zoomed through the solar system at a speed of about 60,000 miles per hour before catapulting out into space again to continue its solitary trek between the stars. However, its strange shape offers few clues about how it was formed, boosting speculation about its artificial origins. Could it actually be a reconnaissance craft sent out by an alien mothership?
Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist from Harvard University, believes there’s a chance this can be proof that we are not alone. Here’s what he had to say to Scientific American:
“Perhaps the aliens have a mothership that travels fast and releases baby spacecraft that freely fall into planetary systems on a reconnaissance mission. In such a case, we might be able to intercept a communication signal between the different spacecraft.”
But heads up, alien-lovers, it appears that this hunk of junk is going through space without any external propulsion, which suggest it’s natural in origin. Experts also recently suggested it could be the wreckage of a destroyed planet.
A destroyed alien planet….dum, dum, dum.
