Our First Interstellar Visitor — Alien Tech?
Claims by Harvard scientists have led to
speculation
A little over a year ago, our solar system was visited by a mysterious object tumbling in from interstellar space. It approached above the plane of our unsuspecting planets and came down inside Mercury’s orbit, swinging past our enormous sun before shooting out and disappearing from view of our telescopes, starting its long path out of our solar system once more. The object caused a rush while it was here; scientists fought competitively for telescope time in the few weeks the object remained visible to us. A process that normally took months was shaved down to just days. It was a moment that made history for many reasons. Not only was this our first ever encounter with any object outside of our solar system, the object itself was so elusive as to spur an all new category of space objects.
While it was first named Rama after Arthur C. Clarke’s science fiction story, scientists later consulted with cultural experts to decide on a Hawaiian name in honor of the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope that first spotted the object flying across our skies. The name they settled on turned out to have a very poetic meaning: “Oumuamua”, or a messenger sent from the past to reach out to us here on Earth.
No comments:
Post a Comment