“Alien Mothership” and Other Recent Wild Space Discoveries
Space has been abuzz the past few weeks with astronomers devoting their attention to an “alien mothership” and a recently discovered super-Earth.
The New York Times obtained documents this week concerning the US State Department’s highly secretive UFO monitoring program. But that wasn’t even one of the most bizarre stories about space activity to recently break.
Alien Mothership
Researchers at Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) on Hawai’i’s Big Island made this discovery back in October.
What’s now known as an “alien mothership” is officially named ‘Oumuamua: the Hawai’ian word for messenger. ‘Oumuamua is a cigar-shaped asteroid hurling through space at 2,000 miles per hour.
Scientists from the Breakthrough Listen project in West Virginia listened to the asteroid on Wednesday, December 13th. What exactly did they listen for? Radio signals that could indicate passengers or onboard equipment.
Researchers themselves are relatively perplexed about the object’s origins. Evidence doesn’t suggest it’s a ship with anything onboard due to the spin rate along with other physical factors like speed and density.
“‘Oumuamua shows no sign of moving due to rocketry or other technology, instead following an orbit shaped by the gravitational force of the sun,” Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist and Breakthrough advisor at Harvard University told Scientific American.
But Loeb kept possibilities open. He went on to say “perhaps the aliens have a mothership that travels fast and releases baby spacecraft that freely fall into planetary system on a reconnaissance mission. In such a case, we might be able to intercept a communication signal between the different spacecraft.”
After listening to the object on Wednesday, the team reached some new conclusions. They now believe this alien mothership is actually a comet covered with an organic carbon-based substance or possibly ice– still a pretty strange conclusion. Research is ongoing.
ISS Under Attack?
Conspiracy theories ran wild over the weekend when reports surfaced about an unidentified object “shooting lasers” at the International Space Station (ISS).
Others believe what appears to be lasers are actually a lens flare. The ISS appeared to sustain no damage from the “attack.”
Still, researchers aren’t quite sure what the object is, and they haven’t really entertained the conspiracy claims. ISS crew members believe the object could be space debris or a meteorite.
Either way, not everyone is convinced. Tyler Glockner, who runs alien hunting YouTube Channel SecureTeam10 remains skeptical due to how quickly NASA jumped to debunk the claims.
Sure, it probably isn’t a spaceship firing lasers, but healthy skepticism makes sense when you consider the UFO files were just recently released.
Super-Earth Capable of Hosting Life Discovered
A team of astronomers from Canada and Europe recently discovered — another — planet billions of light years away.
They believe this planet is capable of supporting life and holding water. The planet is called K2-18b and astronomers discovered it back in 2015.
“Astronomers found that the potential life-supporting planet, which orbits the red-dwarf star K2-18, also has a neighbor planet called K2-18c, although it is probably too hot to be habitable. Located in the Leo constellation, about 111 lightyears away from Earth, the Super-Earth planet was first discovered in 2015. Found orbiting within the dwarf star’s theoretical habitable zone, the planet became a prime candidate for researchers looking for planets that can theoretically support life,” the report states.
By utilizing cutting-edge technology, astronomers were able to measure the planet’s mass, density, and possible composition. They acquired this data from the high-tech High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) in Chile.
The research will continue to the best of human abilities. But since it would take over 2 million years to reach the planet, a manned mission will have to wait. Or just maybe its inhabitants will visit us first.
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Randi Nord lives in Pontiac, Michigan. She is the co-founder of Geopolitics Alert Independent World News.