Harvard’s Avi Loeb more sure than ever we were visited by alien spacecraft – CNET [CNET]

Professor Avi Loeb has had a pioneering career in astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology. He’s authored hundreds of academic papers on topics like black holes and the early days of the universe, collaborated on projects with the legendary Stephen Hawking and helmed Harvard’s astronomy department for almost a decade, longer than anyone in the department’s history. 

But despite an impressive resume that runs deep inside some of the world’s most revered institutions, Loeb has found himself at odds with the mainstream of science in recent years over his most controversial hypothesis. He’s become increasingly convinced a space object many other astronomers assume is just a peculiar space rock is really a piece of alien technology sent in our direction by some sort of extraterrestrial civilization.

“I submit that the simplest explanation for these peculiarities is that the object was created by an intelligent civilization not of this Earth,” Loeb writes in the introduction to his new book about Oumuamua, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth. 

Back in 2017, astronomers (Loeb was not among them) spotted a strange object flying away from Earth with an unusual shape, tumbling end over end and accelerating as it sped out of the solar system. Even more remarkable was that it appeared to originate from beyond our solar system and was just passing through — the first object we’d ever detected from outside our corner of the cosmos.

This first-ever interstellar object was nicknamed Oumuamua, a Hawaiian word that roughly translates as “scout” and is pronounced “oh-MOO-ah-MOO-ah.” Scientists around the world got to work analyzing the limited data on the odd object. Because Oumuamua was only discovered after it had already entered, passed by the sun and Earth and begun to exit our solar system, few telescopes were able to get anything approaching a good close-up image.

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Waiting for the next scout

Loeb and his critics agree on one key thing: Aspects of Oumuamua’s weirdness are difficult to explain without entertaining phenomena we haven’t seen before — be they aliens or pure hydrogen icebergs. And we’re unlikely to ever prove which theory might be correct.

At least not in the specific case of Oumuamua. But Loeb is hopeful its pass by Earth wasn’t a once-in-a-lifetime sort of visit.

He’s optimistic that sensitive equipment, like the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile and its very wide view of the sky, could be able to find an object like Oumumua every single month.

“And then if one of these objects approaches us, we could send a camera close to it, take a photograph and I would be the first to agree that if we see a rock, then it’s natural. But if we see something unusual, we should check it.”

In other words, we’ll likely never see Oumuamua again or figure out exactly what it was, but it still could be a piece to a much larger puzzle that eventually helps us see the much bigger picture of the universe and our place in it.

Loeb’s book ends on a line in the same spirit, which even his most ardent critics would surely agree with:

“The detective work, in short,” he writes, “goes on.”