Energy

Russian Billionaire Intends To Find Out If Alien Life Is Behind Talking Asteroid

Credit: Shutterstock Albert Ziganshin

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Tim Pearce Energy Reporter
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Breakthrough Listen, a $100 million initiative to uncover extraterrestrial signs of life, is using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to glean a signal from the first known interstellar asteroid to pass through Earth’s solar system, The Atlantic reports.

Picking up any kind of signal from the rogue space rock could be an important clue to discovering life on another planet. Russian billionaire Yuri Milner founded the initiative in the hopes that by finding out more about the universe and, possibly, other life forms in it, humans can “know more deeply who we are.”

The asteroid is called ‘Oumuamua, named after it was first photographed from the top of a volcano in Hawaii. It immediately caught scientists’ attention for a variety of reasons, and garnered an audience as it blitzed through the solar system at 38.3 kilometers per second, The Atlantic reports.

In an interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation, the senior scientist for primitive bodies for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Joseph A. Nuth, said the asteroid, or possibly “old star destroyer,” possessed a unique shape and rotation that drew scientists’ attention.

‘Oumuamua is a cylindrical shape, hence the “star destroyer” description. Most other asteroids are spheres and possess tails of burning or melting material as they pass close to stars. After studying ‘Oumuamua’s trail as it passed near the sun, though, scientists could not detect a tail of flashy particles.

‘Oumuamua’s rotation, once every seven hours, would cause other rocks to crumble. The asteroid is thought to be solid rock or metal, because no trace of water or ice could be detected, The Atlantic reports.

Despite the distinctive characteristics, the chance of ‘Oumuamua actually giving off a signal of other forms of life is close to nil, Nuth told TheDCNF. ‘Oumuamua is the first known interstellar asteroid, but probably not the actual first and “won’t be the last.”

Scientists have been studying outer space just over two decades and estimate that an object like ‘Oumuamua drifts through Earth’s galaxy at least once a year.

“We don’t have the capability to see everything,” Nuth said. Astroids are small compared to the vastness of space, and though scientists have discovered many times more asteroids than were known in the 90s, 5,000 asteroids to currently 700,000 known in the solar system, there are still many corners of the solar system that are impossible to monitor at all times.

If ‘Oumuamua beats the odds and a signal is detected, scientists are still landlocked on Earth without the technology to catch the rock as it hurtles away. The rogue alien object is likely to keep its current path as it is obviously not under any intelligent direction, Nuth says.

However, by predicting the path ‘Oumuamua is taking, “we may have the capability to catch it much later” after technology imporoves, Nuth said.

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Tim Pearce