A really huge comet has been discovered in our own solar system. Dubbed 2014 UN271, the comet was first identified by scientists with the Dark Energy Survey (DES). It is said to be the largest comet ever identified at up to 370 kilometers in length. The comet orbits the sun at a distance almost 30 times farther away from it than the Earth’s orbit of the sun. But could this new find be something more ominous, like some sort of alien probe.
NASA explains that comets are “cosmic snowballs of frozen gases, rock and dust that orbit the Sun.” When frozen, they are the size of a small town. When a comet’s orbit brings it close to the Sun, it heats up and spews dust and gases into a giant glowing head larger than most planets. The dust and gases form a tail that stretches away from the Sun for millions of miles. There are likely billions of comets orbiting our Sun.
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They differ from asteroids. Asteroids are pieces of rock, sort of space debris. The solar system has an asteroid belt orbiting the sun. Some scientists speculate that the belt is what is left of a planet that exploded millions of years ago.
But could some things that look to us like asteroids or comets really be alien space crafts in disguise? This is not just a conspiracy theory from the X Files. Such ideas are no longer limited to tin foil hat wearing cooks.
Back in January Harvard Professor Avi Loeb speculated that we were visited by some sort of extra terrestrial device in 2017. In his book “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,” Professor Loeb explains that the Oumuamua object which passed through our solar system was not just a giant piece of space rock, but some sort of alien space ship.
Harvard Professor Avi Loeb
The object was dubbed Oumuamua and originated in Vega, a star 25 light-years away. After zigzagging through the solar system the object headed away from our sun and on to other solar systems. Oumuamua comes from the Hawaiian word for “scout.”
Israeli scientist Abraham (Avi) Loeb is the Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science at Harvard University. He received a PhD in Physics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel at age 24.
Avi Loeb wrote this week in Scientific American, “Many or even most UAP might be natural phenomena. But even if one of them is extraterrestrial, might there be any possible link to ‘Oumuamua?’
“At this time, the possibility that any UAP are extraterrestrial is highly speculative. But if we entertain this possibility for fun, then the tumbling motion of ‘Oumuamua could potentially have been meant to scan signals from all viewing directions.”
