Two Harvard researchers are raising the possibility that a mysterious space object seen tumbling past the sun last year — known as Oumuamua — is an alien spacecraft.
In a paper to be published Nov. 12 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the pair declare that the reddish, elongated, stadium-sized object "may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization,” NBC News reported.
Using a mathematical analysis of the way the object sped up as it shot past the sun, the researchers argue that Oumuamua could be a spacecraft pushed through space by light falling on its surface — a kind of "lightsail of artificial origin,” NBC News reported.
"It is impossible to guess the purpose behind Oumuamua without more data," Avi Loeb, chairman of Harvard's astronomy department and a co-author of the paper, told NBC News.
If Oumuamua is a lightsail, he added, one possibility is that it was floating in interstellar space when our solar system ran into it, "like a ship bumping into a buoy on the surface of the ocean,” NBC News reported.
Loeb and his collaborator, Shmuel Bialy, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, acknowledge the alien spacecraft scenario is an "exotic" one — and other scientists are doubtful.
"It's certainly ingenious to show that an object the size of Oumuamua might be sent by aliens to another star system with nothing but a solar sail for power," Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., told NBC News. "But one should not blindly accept this clever hypothesis when there is also a mundane (and a priori more likely) explanation for Oumuamua — namely that it's a comet or asteroid from afar."
Oumuamua has left the solar system and is no longer visible, the news outlet noted.
“A survey for lightsails as technosignatures [of extraterrestrial civilizations] in the solar system is warranted, irrespective of whether Oumuamua is one of them,” Loeb told NBC News.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.