Apparently the lack of a comet’s characteristic coma associated with interstellar object ‘Oumuamua is really annoying some astronomers, enough so that they’re beginning to explore more outré possibilities:
“‘Oumuamua may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization,” they wrote in the paper, which has been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The theory is based on the object’s “excess acceleration,” or its unexpected boost in speed as it traveled through and ultimately out of our solar system in January.
“Considering an artificial origin, one possibility is that ‘Oumuamua is a light sail, floating in interstellar space as a debris from an advanced technological equipment,” wrote the paper’s authors, suggesting that the object could be propelled by solar radiation.
The paper was written by Abraham Loeb, professor and chair of astronomy, and Shmuel Bialy, a postdoctoral scholar, at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Loeb has published four books and more than 700 papers on topics like black holes, the future of the universe, the search for extraterrestrial life and the first stars. [CNN]
Sounds a little crazy? Turns out this is a very small part of the scientists’ paper. Let Ars Technica straighten you out.
This is, of course, some pretty sloppy science news coverage. But in this case, most of these stories are not being written by trained science writers but rather online reporters who see the potential for a flashy headline. While it is not “fake news,” is is certainly a classic clickbait.
But there’s more at work here. Katie Mack, an astrophysicist and astute observer of scientists and the media, has noted on Twitter that the Harvard scientists knew perfectly well what they were doing. “The thing you have to understand is: scientists are perfectly happy to publish an outlandish idea if it has even the tiniest *sliver* of a chance of not being wrong,” she wrote. “But until every other possibility has been exhausted dozen times over, even the authors probably don’t believe it.
“Some of us are more conservative, of course,” she continued. “And it surely varies by field. But in my area (astrophysics/cosmology), there’s generally no downside to publishing something that’s (a) somehow interesting and (b) not completely ruled out, whether or not it ends up ‘the right answer.'”
In other words, if you’re a researcher looking to create a media splash, you play the, “I’m not saying it was aliens…” card.
Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser
Speaking as a software engineer, a good approach to solving a problem in an efficient and effective manner is actually congruent with the Harvard scientists publishing ‘crime’. Look, most any problem, absent essential evidence, can usually be explained by more than one process. While many times a good guess will yield a solution, an approach not based on intuition is to generate a list, exhaustive if possible, of all sources of the problem which are congruent with the current collection of facts. Using good ol’ Popperian philosophy of science, each potential source should come with a potential fact which would disprove that solution.
Then the process of problem resolution becomes a matter of focused fact collecting. At some point, your list of probable sources of the problem gets down to one, and you now know where to look and even know the solution, if it’s not one of those damn P=NP problems.
In the physical sciences, you may have several still left when all possible facts are collected, and then you’re just left with ranking them based on probabilities.
But the basic philosophy is sound, so I’m not sure I’d call what the scientists did clickbait. Did they list many other possible resolutions to this problem? Dunno, couldn’t find the paper despite the link. But, without a good visual inspection of the object, which is now impossible, we can’t really rule out the possibility that it’s an object from another civilization.
