This could be THAT day, the one you'll always remember where you were when you found out...
A pair of scientists in Harvard have announced that a mysterious object which recently passed near the planet may have been an alien spacecraft.
In a paper to be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on Monday 12 November, the researchers say that the object - named Oumuamua - was initially thought to be an asteroid by most.
However, its flattened, elongated shape, combined with the way it accelerated on its way through the solar system set it apart from conventional asteroids and comets.
The stadium-sized object is reported to have sped up as it shot past the sun, and the scientists say that after a careful mathematical analysis of the interstellar object, Oumuamua could be a spacecraft pushed through space by light falling on its surface, or using the description they give it in the paper, a "lightsail of artificial origin".
Avi Loeb, chairman of Harvard's astronomy department and a co-author of the paper, told
NBC News the following:
"It is impossible to guess the purpose behind Oumuamua without more data, [but the object] may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization."
On the flip-side, Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View in California, said:
"It's certainly ingenious to show that an object the size of Oumuamua might be sent by aliens to another star system with nothing but a solar sail for power. But one should not blindly accept this clever hypothesis when there is also a mundane (and a priori more likely) explanation for Oumuamua — namely that it's a comet or asteroid from afar."
So either it is spaceship.
Or it isn't.
Most likely it isn't.
But until science tells us that it definitely isn't, we'd like to believe that it is.
