Oumuamua—Mayank Chhaya
Over a year after it was first discovered and named Oumuamua, meaning "a messenger that reaches out from the distant past" in Hawaiian, there is renewed theorizing that the unusually shaped object could well have been either a spacecraft or part of one. Researchers at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have raised the extraordinary possibility that Oumuamua "may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization."
The research paper is a serious attempt by Shmuel Bialy and Abraham Loeb of the Harvard center to explain many unusual features of the mysterious object. Ever since its appearance and exit, there has been serious speculation that it was not an asteroid. It was immediately pointed out that Oumuamua was indeed an interstellar object, meaning it came from out side our solar system, which in itself was unprecedented. With that as the tantalizing backdrop it was only natural to speculate whether it may have been an artificial object or, in other words, made and sent by an intelligent alien civilization.
One of the features much talked about has been its likely non-gravitational acceleration suggesting that it might have had its own power source. One exciting suggestion in the paper is that ‘Oumuamua is a lightsail, floating in interstellar space as a debris from an advanced technological equipment." The paper's authors also offer this showstopper," Alternatively, a more exotic scenario is that ‘Oumuamua may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization."
This is a fantastically exciting intelligent speculation which may hold the answer to our eternal question, "Are we alone in the universe?" If Oumuamua indeed turns out to be a spaceship or even a debris of an advanced technological equipment whose origin is interstellar, then we all need to stand up and exult.
I have been excited enough to paint several versions of Oumuamua, one of them being the image accompanied with the post that make it look like a massive artificial object with some circuitry.
With this new paper, it is only fair that I republish a piece I wrote in December, last year.
December 19, 2019
Oumuamua, the mysterious interstellar visitor to our solar system, does not seem to show any sign of alien life so far and prospects for it seems remote as it pulls away to return to whichever part of the universe it came from. However, it is reminding some nerds of the great Arthur C Clarke’s celebrated sci-fi novel ‘Rendezvous with Rama’ about a strangely symmetrical and cylindrical object that comes into our solar system and indeed turns out to be an alien spaceship.
As noted by many, it is striking that Oumuamua should show up around the 100th birth anniversary of Clarke’s on December 16. Although the interstellar asteroid was discovered in October we can broadly coincide with Clarke’s birth anniversary symbolically.
I checked out a passage from ‘Rendezvous with Rama’ where it first introduces the spaceship. Indians would be thrilled to know how it came to be named Rama by Clarke, who lived in Sri Lanka, the putative hub of Ravana, Rama’s arch adversary. Let me quote some passages from the novel.
In the novel the object is first identified as 31/439 and given that it is indeed an alien spaceship those who discovered feel compelled to christen it memorably. The year was 2130 by which Mars-based radars were discovering asteroids “at the rate of a dozen a day.”
The object was of an exceptional size. “From the strength of echo, the computers deduced a diameter of at least forty kilometers,” Clarke writes. The object was not on a normal asteroidal path. In a somewhat disconcertingly similar attribute to Oumuamua, Clarke writes, “It was a lonely wanderer among the stars, making its first and last visit to the solar system—for it was moving so swiftly that the gravitational field of the Sun could never capture it.” Oumuamua too is moving too fast to be captured by the Sun’s gravitational field.
In terms of nomenclature, Clarke writes, “Long ago astronomers had exhausted Greek and Roman mythology; now they were working through the Hindu pantheon. And so 31/439 was christened Rama.”
Alas, unlike Rama, Oumuamua does not appear to be an alien spaceship. The latest findings suggest that traveling at 100,000 km/hour it has a coating of carbon-rich ices. The coating has been described as “organic gunk.” So far though no radio signals have been detected which would have given it a wholly remarkable feature of being an artificial object rather than just a random space rock. Its cigar shape caused some speculation about what it could be but so far no sign that it is anything other than the most likely explanation—a random space rock from a different star system.
I read that unlike a spaceship, which would glide in a controlled, measured fashion, Oumuamua is head over heels and wobbly. That prompted me to paint it the way I have in the accompanying art. At the very least Oumuamua has stirred me up enough to read Clarke’s ‘Rendezvous with Rama’ again.
There are those who are not inclined to call it just a space rock because it is elongated in shape and interstellar in origin. It is almost as if we want it to be other than what it might actually be—a random space rock. We want it to be an alien spaceship. It is no longer possible to rendezvous with it because it was always too far to mount a mission and is now pulling away rapidly. The only hope is to catch some radio signal which is also fading fast.
