Earlier today scientist got to see a curious shape structure that passed near Earth. Since it might have been an asteroid, its shape is mostly looking like a spacecraft. Researchers from the SETI – Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence- project are about to find out where this strange object came off by pointing a powerful telescope in that direction.
Oumuamua
Astronomers from the University of Hawaii were the first who saw the object which happens to be the first visitor from another part of the galaxy into our solar system. They name it Oumuamua, after the Hawaiian term “messenger”. At first, when it appeared it was considered to be an asteroid but after a set of strange features, they took a deeper interest. It is very uncommon for an asteroid to shape like the one they saw: a metres long body and only one-tenth wide might turn into a long-distance spacecraft since it can ever avoid interstellar gas and dust while flying in the space.
Features to follow
Travelling at up to 196,000mph without getting trapped into the sun’s gravity, situated at the twice the distance between the Earth and sun, the object will fly through and out of the solar system easily. Back in 2015, the digital tech mogul Yuri Milner from the Breakthrough Listen team gave a statement about the most likely architecture for a spacecraft to be: the one of a needle shape. For tracking Oumuamua, The Breakthrough Team is using the Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia. They will set the giant telescope across four radio frequency bands spanning one to 12 gigahertz, on December 12th at 8PM UK’s time.
A new vision for the future
Even if the object turns out to be either artificial or natural, the search could give important information about gases surrounding the mysterious object. The Breakthrough Team has the chance to reach unprecedented sensitivities to possible artificial transmitters for tracking nearby, fast-moving objects, said Dr Andrew Siemion of the Berkeley Seti Research Centre in California. The telescope can detect an omnidirectional transmitter with a power of a mobile phone in less than a minute.
The Breakthrough Listen targets deep into the space to find some alien signs, since no convincing proof of extraterrestrial existence was found.