Oumuamua. We may not be alone in the universe...
- Current Events
- Nov 11, 2018
- 2 min read
This past weekend the world went crazy after the emergence of the theory that says Oumuamua can be a sign of extraterrestrial life.
But what is exactly Oumuamua?
Oumuamua is an object that has an elongated shape like a 60-story building that is hanging around our solar system with out knowing where it comes from.
This past week, Shmuel Bialy and Abraham Loeb, two astrophysicists published their research about Oumuamua and caused controversy. Why? In their research they mention the possibility that Oumuamua is an object of artificial origin, in other words that someone out there did it.
But the first sightings of Oumuamua date back to October 19, 2017, when the Canadian astronomer Robert Weryk discovered a faint bright spot in sky images taken by the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope, located at the Haleakala observatory on the island of Maui, Hawaii. Robert thought that this was a simple comet but after a month he realized that its trajectory had not changed so he decided to look for more data about it and found them in observations taken from a telescope of the European Space Agency located in the Observatory of Izaña, in Tenerife, Canary Islands.
After time to investigate it was concluded that Oumuamua came from some distant point of our galaxy outside our solar system.
There were many theories before thinking about an alien ship. First it was thought that this was a comet but then this assumption was discarded since Oumuamua did not have the characteristic tail of ice and gases of a comet. Also it was observed something very peculiar, when Oumuamua passed near the sun, it took an inexplicable impulse as if it wanted to get away from the sun and also approached the earth in a very unusual way.
It was called Oumuamua, a Hawaiian word meaning 'explorer' or 'messenger that comes from afar', and it is said to be the first object of interest of this kind in history, that the trajectory that follows is completely out of the ordinary, It has strange changes of direction, it rotates on its trajectory exactly every 7 hours and its speed is such that it is not believed it will be near our solar system ever again.
There are many possible explanations but what we can be sure of is that Oumuamua is not a comet and is not anything we have ever seen.
MGV
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Image taken from:
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/660/cpsprodpb/C6E0/production/_104221905_tv050436324.jpg
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