Oumuamua, as envisioned by researchers

Scientists have been baffled by Oumuamua since this mysterious object was discovered flying past the Sun in late 2017. With its high speed and unusual trajectory, this stadium-sized red object clearly originates from outside our solar system.

The problem lies in Oumuamua’s flat, elongated shape and the way it accelerates through our solar system, which is nothing like typical comets or asteroids.

Recently, two researchers from Harvard University have hypothesized that Oumuamua is a spacecraft!

In a report to be published in the Astrophysical Journal on November 12th, they describe the object as “possibly a probe deliberately sent close to Earth by an alien civilization.”

Initially, no one dared to claim that “aliens” were controlling Oumuamua, but after careful mathematical analysis of how the object accelerated through the solar system, the research team cautiously suspected it was a spacecraft powered by solar radiation.

But who sent the spacecraft to Earth and why?

“It’s impossible to guess Oumuamua’s purpose without more data. One possibility is that it was drifting through space when it encountered our solar system, like a ship hitting a buoy on the ocean surface,” commented Avi Loeb, chairman of the Harvard astronomy department and co-author of the study, on NBC News.

Loeb and his colleague Shmuel Bialy at Harvard University acknowledge that the alien spacecraft hypothesis sounds quite “bold,” and it’s not surprising that other scientists are skeptical.

“It’s very clever to point to an object the size of Oumuamua as a spacecraft sent by aliens. But we shouldn’t blindly accept that hypothesis when there are other, more understandable explanations, such as a meteor or comet from afar,” commented Seth Shostak, an astronomy expert at the SETI Institute in California.

For his part, Loeb called the conjecture “purely scientific and evidence-based,” quoting Sherlock Holmes’s argument that “When you eliminate all impossible options, what remains, however uncertain, is the truth.”

But this truth is probably difficult to verify; Oumuamua has left the solar system, and telescopes from Earth can no longer observe it.