Harvard University astronomer found out that that an extraterrestrial object skimmed through space near Earth in 2017.
Harvard professor Avi Loeb, in his book ‘Extraterrestrial: The First Evidence of Intelligent Life Outside Earth’ to be written this month, said it was the first sign of intelligent life outside of Earth.
According to the marketing summary of the book, scientists at the Hawaiian Observatory saw “an object soaring through our inner solar system, moving so quickly that it could only have been from another star.”
The object, named 1I/2017 U1 ‘Oumuamua’ by Nasa, was not a natural occurrence, but a bit of space junk sent to us by aliens from another galaxy, Leob said.
Oumuamua was initially identified as a comet, however, measurements showed no evidence of cometary movement after the sun’s transit on 9 September 2017 at a blister speed of 196,000 miles per hour (87.3 kilometres per second) based on information available on solarsystem.nasa.gov.
Nasa’s results suggest that the object in space has been roaming through the Milky Way Galaxy, unattached to any system of stars, for hundreds of millions of years until its probable interaction with our system of stars.
Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator for NASA’s Research Project in Washington, DC, said in November 2017 that for centuries scientists have expected that such interstellar phenomena would be out there, and for the first time they had concrete proof that they existed.
According to the Businessinsider post, Anne Wojcicki, CEO and co-founder of 23andMe, wrote a blurb in the book jacket.
“An exciting and eloquent case that we might have seen a sign of intelligent life near Earth – and that we should search further,” Businessinsider quoted WWojcicki as saying.
In his forthcoming novel, Avi Loeb sets out a convincing argument for why Oumuamua, which wandered into our solar system, was not only another comet, but most likely a disc smaller than a millimetre wide, with sail-like dimensions that would explain its extraordinary acceleration as it drifted away from the sun, notes the New York Post.
