![]() ![]() He discussed those anomalies in his book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, published at the beginning of this year. Astronomers calculated the far-off object’s unusual shape based on the ways it brightened and dimmed as it rotated.Įuropean Southern Observatory / Science Photo Libraryīut Loeb was struck by all the ways ‘Oumuamua did not behave like a typical comet or asteroid. This article is a selection from the October issue of Smithsonian magazine BuyĪn artist’s rendering of ‘Oumuamua. Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 ![]() So why would you go to the most extreme explanation and assume it’s aliens? You still need to follow the scientific process, and I wish Avi had done more of that.” But still, we know there are comets and asteroids that share some characteristics with ‘Oumuamua. “It was a hard experiment, because the object was moving rapidly away from us. “We laughingly called it Rama for a while,” she adds, a reference to the interstellar starship in the 1973 Arthur C. “When we first discovered ‘Oumuamua, of course we joked, ‘Could it be alien technology?’” says Karen Meech, the interim director for astrobiology and solar system bodies at the University of Hawaii, and part of the team that collected the data. No one expected someone of Loeb’s stature to make such a suggestion, and some of his colleagues wished he hadn’t. The legendary Stephen Hawking had flown across the Atlantic for the occasion, attending a Passover Seder at Loeb’s home during his visit. This was a man who, just a year earlier, had launched Harvard’s prestigious Black Hole Initiative, the world’s first interdisciplinary program to focus on black holes. It was an astonishing idea coming from the chair of Harvard’s astronomy department. Loeb suggested something completely different: Maybe ‘Oumuamua was a light-powered sail manufactured by aliens. Maybe it was a dust cloud with an ultra-low density, held together by forces scientists couldn’t understand. Maybe ‘Oumuamua was a piece of a Pluto-like planet ejected from another arm of the Milky Way galaxy. Scientists proposed various theories in scientific journals. It was unlike anything astronomy had ever seen. It accelerated suddenly without leaving any visible trail, and reflected sunlight indicated that it was flat like a pancake. They observed it for a few weeks until it disappeared from view, and named it ‘Oumuamua, a Hawaiian word that means “messenger from afar arriving first.” The sighting was especially dramatic because the object behaved in baffling ways. In October 2017, the University of Hawaii’s Pan-STARRS1 telescope caught the first-ever glimpse of an object from outside our own solar system whizzing past the Sun. He has published more than 700 papers and essays, making major contributions to the study of black holes and to gravitational microlensing, a technique for detecting objects that are shrouded in darkness all throughout the observable universe.īut a few years ago, the trajectory of his well-established career took a dramatic turn. Since 2007, he has directed Harvard’s Institute for Theory and Computation (which is part of the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian). Harvard recruited him in 1993, and in 2011 he became the chair of the astronomy department, a position he held for nine years. Loeb started out at Princeton in the late 1980s, studying the birth of the first stars. His eyes are blue behind rimless glasses, and his wide-awake face seems to emit its own light. Professor of Science at Harvard University, wearing a black blazer and black polo shirt. Now the Israeli-born astrophysicist, whom everyone calls Avi, is sitting on his porch in Lexington, Massachusetts, watching birds flutter around a feeder. ![]() And in 1936, Loeb’s grandfather had to have the foresight to leave Germany, making his branch of the family tree the only one to survive. One species of primate had to learn to speak and write and invent technology. On one particular planet (and no one really knows how) single-celled organisms had to appear and evolve into complex creatures. Abraham Loeb knows how improbable it is that he’s here. ![]()
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