ʻOumuamua

Overview

ʻOumuamua is the nickname given to a cigar-shaped object named after the Hawaiian word for "messenger that reaches out from the distant past." Over a year after its discovery, internet discussions about the object saw a resurgence in popularity after a paper was published by researchers at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, which noted that the object may have been an alien spacecraft sent to investigate planet Earth.

Background

In October 2017, the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawaii. Scientists determined that it was elongated in shape, hundreds of meters long and was the first interstellar object ever discovered.

Developments

On November 20th, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
uploaded a video about the object titled "First Interstellar Asteroid Wows Scientists," which garnered upwards of 1.8 million views and 2,900 comments over the next year (shown below, left). On December 13th, the PBS Space Time YouTube channel uploaded a video titled "The Origin of 'Oumuamua, Our First Interstellar Visitor" (shown below, right). Within one year, the video accumulated more than 972,000 views and 3,100 comments. In the video, host Matt O'Dowd repeatedly states that "It's never aliens" when discussing the object's origins.

On July 19th, 2018, the TED YouTube channel uploaded a presentation on Oumuamua by astrobiologist Karen J. Meech, which received more than 1.09 million views and 2,700 comments over the next four months (shown below).

Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Paper

On November 1st, 2018, a paper titled "Could Solar Radiation Pressure Explain 'Oumuamua's Peculiar Acceleration?", which posited that the object might have been a "lightsail of artificial origin."^[1] On November 5th, YouTuber Computing Forever uploaded a video titled "Oumuamua: Comet or Alien Solar Probe?" (shown below).

Meanwhile, a post about the paper reached the front page of the /r/physics^[4] subreddit. The following day, Elon Musk tweeted a link to a CNN article titled "Interstellar object may have been alien probe" (shown below).^[3]

Search Interest

External References