When astronomers spotted a bizarre cigar-shaped asteroid floating through the heavens earlier this year, they immediately launched a bid to find out if it was alien in origin. Now the latest results of a scan for signs that it Asteroid ‘Oumuamua was built by an extraterrestrial civilisation have been released. The strange object is twice as big as the Gherkin skyscraper, stretching to about 400 metres long, and is the first space rock observed in our Solar System after travelling here from elsewhere.
Its discovery sparked claims that it could be an alien reconnaissance craft, zooming through the galaxy on a mission to seek our life and civilisations. Sadly, this theory was scotched because the rock appeared to be tumbling through space, which means it’s either natural in origin – or a spaceship with a broken-down engine.
Earlier this year Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist from Harvard University thinks there’s a small chance that the asteroid could finally reveal whether humanity is alone in the universe. ‘Perhaps the aliens have a mothership that travels fast and releases baby spacecraft that freely fall into planetary systems on a reconnaissance mission,’ Loeb told Scientific American. ‘In such a case, we might be able to intercept a communication signal between the different spacecraft.’ UFO hunters will be disappointed by a new piece of research from a team of scientists who examined the asteroid using the Murchison Widefield Array, a telescope in Western Australia. They checked for signals and transmissions which could prove it was an alien spacecraft. Sadly, none were found.
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