Last year, we were captivated by the discovery of an all new type of celestial body: a never-before-seen “cigar-shaped” object, which was also the first find from another star system mankind has ever recorded. Ten times longer than it was wide and displaying other unusual features, it was such a unique find there wasn’t even a consensus in the scientific community on how to classify it. Comet? Asteroid? Something else? Now some scientists are offering another suggestion: alien craft sent to probe Earth. But don’t freak out, because it’s almost certainly not that. Almost certainly.
This wild theory was shared in a paper by Harvard astronomers. While they offer a natural explanation for the interstellar object’s unusually high acceleration and strange trajectory, they do raise the possibility that the long, dark-red object known as ‘Oumuamua (Hawaiian for “a messenger from afar arriving firstâ€) could have an “artificial origin,” the forgotten remnants of a technology we are familiar with.“One possibility is that ‘Oumuamua is a lightsail, floating in interstellar space as a debris from an advanced technological equipment. Lightsails with similar dimensions have been designed and constructed by our own civilization…”
Hmm, space sails you say? …Could it be DOOKU!
Images:Â European Southern Observatory/M. Kornmesser, Lucasfilm