Avi Loeb, chairman of Harvard University’s Astronomy Department and friend of late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, claims that the mysterious interstellar object Oumuamua is actually a spaceship sent be extraterrestrials, and it uses a solar sail for propulsion.
Put simply, the Spitzer Space Telescope found no evidence of heat emission from the object, and that means that it is at least 10 times more reflective than a typical comet or asteroid. Loeb believes that what we have, then, is a thin, flat, shiny object, thus causing him to arrive at the idea of a solar sail. In other words, a solar sail spacecraft that uses the sun for propulsion rather than fuel. It’s propelled ahead by reflecting light.
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The first question we asked is whether a sail like Oumuamua could survive billions of years in the Milky Way – and we discovered that it could. Being hit by interstellar dust or gas won’t wear it down. Afterward, we tried to calculate the acceleration a solar sail would cause in an object such as a ship or probe, and we found that the acceleration is consistent with that of Oumuamua,” said Loeb.
