Late last year, scientists discovered the asteroid ‘Oumuamua which travelled through our solar system after arriving from another star.
While the cigar-shaped asteroid passed through the solar system, scientists began theorising that asteroids could have come from far away and then stayed.
A newer theory from experts at Harvard’s Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, Shmuel Bialy and Abraham Loeb, said that ‘Oumuamua may have been sent by aliens to survey other galaxies.
Speaking with Universe Today towards the end of October, Professor Loeb said: “We explain the excess acceleration of ‘Oumuamua away from the sun as the result of the force that the sunlight exerts on its surface.
“For this force to explain measured excess acceleration, the object needs to be extremely thin, of order a fraction of a millimetre in thickness but tens of meters in size.
“This makes the object lightweight for its surface area and allows it to act as a light sail.
“Its origin could be either natural (in the interstellar medium or proto-planetary disks) or artificial (as a probe sent for a reconnaissance mission into the inner region of the solar system).”
Now, experts have spoken up on the two astronomers’ out there theory, aggressively refuting the claim.
Alan Fitzsimmons, an astrophysicist at Queens University, Belfast, said: “Like most scientists, I would love there to be convincing evidence of alien life, but this isn’t it.
“It has already been shown that its observed characteristics are consistent with a comet-like body ejected from another star system.
“And some of the arguments in this study are based on numbers with large uncertainties.”
Katie Mack, an astrophysicist at North Carolina State, also had an issue with the theory.
She wrote on Twitter: “The thing you have to understand is: scientists are perfectly happy to publish an outlandish idea if it has even the tiniest sliver of a chance of not being wrong
But until every other possibility has been exhausted dozen times over, even the authors probably don’t believe it.”
However, Prof Loeb defended his theory, and said we will never know the truth as the asteroid is unlikely to pass through out solar system ever again.
He told NBC News: “It is impossible to guess the purpose behind ‘Oumuamua without more data.”
The bizarre cigar-shaped space rock is believed to have been wandering among the stars for hundreds of millions of years and it is the first foreign object to be spotted in our solar system.
‘Oumuamua is about 400 metres long and is a dark red colour and was spotted by the Pan-STARRS1 telescope in Hawaii on October 19, 2017, travelling at about 95,000 kilometres per hour.