Has Earth been visited by an alien spaceship? Harvard professor Avi Loeb vs everybody else

By Simon Goodwin, Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Sheffield

A highly unusual object was spotted travelling through the solar system in 2017. Given a Hawaiian name,ʻOumuamua, it was small and elongated – a few hundred metres by a few tens of meters, travelling at a speed fast enough to escape the Sun’s gravity and move into interstellar space.

I was at a meeting when the discovery of ʻOumuamua was announced, and a friend immediately said to me, “So how long before somebody claims it’s a spaceship?” It seems that whenever astronomers discover anything unusual,…

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