Preliminary Scan Suggests This Interstellar Visitor Is Not an Alien Spaceship
Source: Gizmodo
On October 19, 2017, astronomers witnessed the first known interstellar asteroid—a bizarre, cigar-shaped rock that, just as quickly as it entered into our Solar System, exited in a hurry. Not satisfied that ‘Oumuamua, as it’s been named, is just an odd asteroid, astronomers from Breakthrough Listen recently tuned their Green Bank telescope into the object to see if it’s an alien spaceship or some kind of probe. The preliminary results are now in and—brace yourself—it’s still a rock.
Typically, scientists at Breakthrough Listen hunt for aliens by scanning distant stars, but when ‘Oumuamua (pronounced “oh-moo-ah-moo-ah” and meaning “a messenger from afar arriving first”) paid us an unexpected visit, it was an opportunity they couldn’t pass up. Indeed, astronomers have catalogued around 750,000 asteroids, yet this is the only known chunk of rock to originate from a different stellar neighborhood. What’s more, ‘Oumuamua’s strange shape and awesome speed (it’s moving at 26.3 km/s) hinted at something perhaps not quite natural.
Using Breakthrough Listen’s backend instrument on the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, the astronomers ran the first of four scans, or “blocks,” of observations from 3:45pm to 9:45pm ET on December 13. The asteroid, or alleged spaceship, was scanned across four radio bands, each of which corresponded to four radio receivers, denoted L, S, X, C, and spanning billions of individual channels from 1 to 12 GHz. During this first block of observations, the astronomers also collected 90 TB of data, which, unsurprisingly, they’re still parsing through.
No artificial signals were detected within this first block of data. So depending on your opinion of aliens, this is either good or bad news (raises hand that this is good news).
Read more: https://gizmodo.com/preliminary-scan-suggests-this-interstellar-visitor-is-1821305279
Well, that's disappointing.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Bummer!
A leading astronomer studying the origins of the space object known as Oumuamua has come out declaring it’s an alien probe with broken engines. Dr. Jason Wright claims that Oumuamua’s movement is that of a craft that has lost power to its engines.
Professor Avi Loeb, Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University, said: “My recommendation, as in any dialogue, is that we first listen and do our best to understand what we are hearing. Once we figure this out, we can decide how to respond,” he said. “Overall, I am an optimist. I believe that a very intelligent civilization 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 civilization will have hostile intentions and risk our existence, so we should deliberate carefully in any future contact with them.”
Dr. Wright from Penn State University is already declaring it a spacecraft. Oumuamua is about a quarter of a mile long, 260 feet wide, and currently traveling at 196,000 mph. Rather than moving through space like other natural space rocks, astronomers believe that it is “tumbling” through our solar system.
‘”Such derelict craft would, if they are not traveling so fast that they escape the Galaxy, eventually ‘thermalize’ with the stars and end up drifting around like any other interstellar comet or asteroid,” Dr. Wright wrote in his blog.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...N-engines.html
Byrd made damn sure he brought the bacon home!! 
