Nomitkon, Tajikistan — I’d never seen a bread eating cat before. But this cat loved bread. He would practically sit down at the table and wait to be served. The owners would throw him a few pieces and then throw him out of the house, but he would soon sneak back in and continue looking longingly at the loaves.
Scientists have been puzzling over Oumuamua ever since the mysterious space object was observed tumbling past the sun in late 2017. Given its high speed and its unusual trajectory, the reddish, stadium-sized whatever-it-is had clearly come from outside our solar system. But its flattened, elongated shape and the way it accelerated on its way through the solar system set it apart from conventional asteroids and comets.
Now a pair of Harvard researchers are raising the possibility that Oumuamua is an alien spacecraft. As they say in a paper to be published Nov. 12 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the object “may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization.”
The researchers aren’t claiming outright that aliens sent Oumuamua. But after a careful mathematical analysis of the way the interstellar object sped up as it shot past the sun, they say Oumuamua could be a spacecraft pushed through space by light falling on its surface — or, as they put it in the paper, a “lightsail of artificial origin.” (source)
A very fun and cool thing about this is that, while this is really new and exciting for us, it also has raised a lot of questions because this was caught completely by accident on a telescope that shouldn’t have been able to pick it up given its speed- this was a really lucky fluke. What a lot of scientists hypothesize is that there are multiple objects like this- in fact hundreds of them- that we just hadn’t been picking up on until we found one by accident. There could be thousands of Oumuamua scoping out the earth every year, and we had no idea until a little telescope in Hawaii caught a glimpse.
Getting back into drawing again since the new year. I can’t believe how rusty I feel after not drawing for a week. I really want to explore more iridescent coloring styles :)
Everyone has their own nightmare in-law story, though I couldn’t imagine how bad mine would be. As it turns out the worst thing wasn’t my mother-in-law poisoning me, the worst thing was why she did it.
I met Craig on one of my rare vacations and we had sort of a whirlwind relationship. We fell hard for each other and were married in a courthouse wedding within two months without ever meeting each other’s families. Mine visited a few weeks later and after their initial shock really liked Craig.
