Author: Kaila Hale-Stern / Source: themarysue.com
Avi Loeb, the chairman of Harvard’s astronomy department, has sparked excitement and ruffled the feathers of his peers with the suggestion that an alien ship could be sailing past Jupiter.
As The Washington Post reports, Loeb, a prominent astronomer in his field, has introduced the idea that the first known interstellar object, spotted in 2017 and dubbed ‘Oumuamua (Hawaiian for “Scout”), might be technology from another civilization.
What you can’t call Loeb is a crank. When astronomers in Hawaii stumbled across the first known interstellar object in late 2017 — a blip of light moving so fast past the sun that it could only have come from another star — Loeb had three decades of Ivy League professorship and hundreds of astronomical publications on his résumé, mostly to do with the nature of black holes and early galaxies and other subjects far from any tabloid shelf. […]
“Considering an artificial origin, one possibility is that ‘Oumuamua” — pronounced Oh-mooah-mooah — “is a lightsail, floating in interstellar space as a debris from an advanced technological equipment,” Loeb wrote with his colleague Shmuel Bialy in Astrophysical Journal Letters in November — thrilling E.T. enthusiasts and upsetting the fragile orbits of space academia.
The Post article spends some time with the animated Loeb and the range of reactions to the lightsail…
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