Scientists Come Up With the Lamest Possible Explanation for the Mysterious Object That Passed Through Our Solar System
Shutterstock Images.This is an artist's rendition of Oumuamua, the celestial object with a name like a Survivor tribe (which means "Scout" in Hawaiian) that passed through our solar system in 2017 and already had us in its rear view by the time our most sophisticated equipment and most brilliant minds knew it was there.
Many possible explanations for what Oumuamua is and where its place of origin could be were floated. Most notably by Harvard professor and KFC guest Avi Loeb, of Harvard University:
Futurist - An ancient alien civilization may have seeded the Earth with sensors providing a readout on what it’s like within our solar system’s habitable zone, Harvard University astronomer Avi Loeb suggests, and new unexplained aerial phenomena (UAP) sightings might be a sign of extraterrestrials following up.
Specifically, he says the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua might have been a spacecraft sent to tune into their signals, Loeb wrote in a new Scientific American op-ed. It’s an unusual explanation linking two separate topics — ‘Oumuamua’s trajectory and recent UAP sightings — but at the very least it’s interesting to consider all the possibilities of advanced life beyond Earth. …
As possible evidence, Loeb points out that ‘Oumuamua is tumbling around as it soars through space, raising the possibility that its broader flatter surfaces contain equipment capable of picking up the signals from whatever hidden sensors earlier probes may have dropped off.
Professor Loeb made his theory public in 2021. Since then we've discovered nothing more about Oumuamua, its point of origin, or its purpose as it has continued to speed out of our cosmic neighborhood. But leave it to the buzzkills in the rest of academia to spend the intervening months looking for ways to shoot down his hypothesis:
Source - When the Oumuamua comet whizzed past Earth in 2017, scientists were mystified by its unusual characteristics.
Comets accelerate when they get close to the sun because, as they heat up, the ice stored inside turns to water vapour that is ejected outwards, acting as a thruster.
This expulsion of gas manifests as a dust tail or a bright halo called a 'coma' - yet Oumuamua had neither of these things and was still accelerating. …
[N]ow, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and Cornell University in the US have come up with a new, more simple explanation.
The lack of trail could be because the tiny comet was expelling a thin shell of hydrogen gas that was undetectable to telescopes. …
Models showed that the force of this expulsion of gas would be enough to cause the small object to accelerate off its hyperbolic trajectory around the sun. …
This research proves that, disappointingly, they are not necessarily signs of alien life, and are actually behaving as should be expected.
Riiight.
I'll be the first to admit I have a bachelor's in Business I've never used from a state college and wouldn't last a minute in a UCB or Cornell physics lab. But if these science dorks expect me to believe a mysterious, tumbling, space cigar with broad, flat surfaces, no detectable means of propulsion, but that somehow manages to accelerate away from our sun, they've got another thing coming.
They've had, what? Five years to work on this, and this is what they come up with? Comet farts. Air shooting out of the back of it like a birthday party clown let go of the balloon animal he was making. Humans have been watching comets since we first had vertebrae to crane out necks up to the night sky. We've told time by them. Seen them as signs from the gods. Built telescopes to track them. Even worshiped them. But this is the first one that's ever come equipped with its own rocket engine. And the eggheads at Berkeley and Cornell expect us to buy what they're selling?
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Yeah, nice try, science. But this is obviously them just grasping at straws because they can't disprove Prof. Loeb's theory with the usual claptrap about weather balloons (which doesn't sound so ridiculous any more) and swamp gas.
Here's what I wrote about Loeb's hypothesis two years ago. And nothing I read today can dissuade me from what I believed then:
Even conceding that this is speculation by the good professor, mere conjecture in the form of a thought experiment, it's a product of one of the smartest minds in the world on the subject. Many of Einstein's ideas were all theoretical, until they were proven to be accurate by science decades later. More to the point, his theory on Scout (sorry Hawaii, but I'm tired of spelling its real name) are utterly plausible. The object is unlikely to have been made naturally. It's tumbling through space in a way that we don't see in our solar system. And we're experiencing an uptick in the number of UFO/UAP sightings. So it's perfectly plausible to connect those dots and see this thing as a probe, sent through the area to collect data from other, smaller probes. Like a net scooping up sonobuoys that were dropped by marine researchers to study currents and tides.
And I'll add my own theory that it could be here to make contact with the whales it hasn't heard from in a while.
Live long and prosper, Oumuamua.