Could Mysterious Cigar-Shaped Comet Be Alien Spaceship?

A mysterious, cigar-shaped, 400-meter-long object is speeding through our solar system at almost 200,000 miles per hour, and astronomers – including Professor Stephen Hawking – believe it might (or might not) be an alien spaceship.

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Oumuamua, Hawaiian for 'a messenger from afar arriving first,' is the first interstellar object ever observed in our solar system, and the oddly shaped comet – it’s elongated, while most are round – is causing quite the stir.

An international team of scientists, called Breakthrough Listen, is deploying high-tech scanners to determine whether Oumuamua was sent by an alien civilization.   

Using the world's largest directable radio telescope, at Green Bank in West Virginia, they are listening for electromagnetic signals – no stronger than those emitted by a mobile phone – that can’t be produced by natural celestial bodies.

If they find them, it would be proof that extraterrestrial forces really could be at play: potentially one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time.

"Researchers working on long-distance space transportation have previously suggested that a cigar or needle shape is the most likely architecture for an interstellar spacecraft, since this would minimise friction and damage from interstellar gas and dust," Professor Hawking and his colleagues at Breakthrough Listen report.

If a radio signal does come back from the object, Avi Loeb, Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University, suggests we should proceed with caution.

"My recommendation, as in any dialogue, is that we first listen and do our best to understand what we are hearing," he told the Daily Mail.

"Once we figure this out, we can decide how to respond. Overall, I am an optimist. I believe that a very intelligent civilisation will be peaceful, and we could save ourselves millions or billions of years by learning from it.

"But there is also the possibility that such a civilisation will have hostile intentions and risk our existence, so we should deliberate carefully in any future contact with them."

Even if the comet turns out not to be an alien probe – and we should know for sure within a few days – the experiment will not have been wasted.

"Oumuamua's presence within our solar system affords Breakthrough Listen an opportunity to reach unprecedented sensitivities to possible artificial transmitters and demonstrate our ability to track nearby, fast-moving objects," Andrew Siemion, director of Berkeley's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Research Center, told The Independent.

"Whether this object turns out to be artificial or natural, it's a great target for Listen."

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