![]() ![]() He writes frequently for Scientific American and fires off papers on a wide range of subjects - from cosmology to black holes to the desirability of inspecting exoplanet atmospheres for signs of industrial pollution or even nuclear war. It is fair to say that Loeb, who was raised with a philosophical bent on a farm in Israel, the son of refugees from the Holocaust and war-torn Europe, is one of the more imaginative and articulate scientists around. In which case the age-old question - are we alone in the universe? - has been answered. ![]() Such objects often get accelerated by jets of evaporating gases on their surface, although in this case no evaporating gases were detected.īut Loeb argues that it is no more preposterous to suppose that Oumuamua was a lightsail, a thin material that gets its propulsive boost from sunlight or starlight, either launched in our direction or anchored like a buoy in space, where we ran into it on our planet’s travel around the galaxy. Based on some surprising herky-jerky motions as it departed our realm, astronomers concluded that Oumuamua was a weird comet. An artist’s interpretation of reddish, cigar-shaped rock was widely reproduced. Nobody ever got a picture of the object, but from how its brightness varied as it apparently tumbled, astrophysicists were able to deduce that it was about a quarter-mile across and at least five to 10 times longer than it was wide. It had come from outside the solar system, from the direction of the star Vega. 19, 2017, when it was already on its way out of the solar system, having passed closest to the sun a month before. Oumuamua - Hawaiian for “scout” - was first noticed by a telescope on the island of Maui on Oct. “Is human civilization ready to confront what follows our accepting the plausible conclusion, arrived at through evidence-backed hypotheses, that terrestrial life isn’t unique and perhaps not even particularly impressive? I fear the answer is no, and that prevailing prejudice is a cause for concern.” “Are we, both scientists and lay people, ready?” he asks in his introduction. ![]()
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