Harvard scientists claim an alien ship flew past Earth

The mysterious rock that flew past Earth could actually have been an alien spacecraft sailing past us using light, according to a new paper.

When Oumuamua flew past Earth, scientists rushed to learn about it: it was the first known object ever to have made it into our solar system from another. But as they scrambled to research it, the rock made its way out of the other side of our solar system, giving researchers only a glimpse to make the most of.

In that short time, astronomers established that the object was moving strangely. It was spinning very quickly as it flew through the solar system, and seemed to speed up rather than slow down as it went.

Now a new paper suggests that could be because the object is acting as a “light sail”, gliding through space and using the sun as its energy source. If so, that might have happened by accident – or the object might in fact be a spacecraft made by an alien race, they said.

The object might be “a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilisation”, the researchers write.

It is not the first time that astronomers have suggested the rock could potentially be an alien spacecraft. Soon after it was discovered, researchers with the Breakthrough Listen project announced they would be monitoring it and seeing if it was sending out radio signals.

The new study, written by Shmuel Bialy and Abraham Loeb from the Harvard Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, looks at the way that solar radiation could be used to power the object as it flies through space. They calculate that it would have to be very thin but very wide – and that such a shape would be possible.