||| 9th - TiE Talk |||

||| 9th - TiE Talk ||| ENIGMA OF OUMUAMUA: FIRST INTERSTELLAR OBJECT IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM Prof. Alok Patnaik, KIIT DU, BBSR On Google Meet 10th April 7 pm IST Link for online meet : meet.google.com/fie-fjsy-wqd Query if any: tietalks2020@gmail.com Welcome you to this exciting talk that will take you across the deep space to discover the beauty of our expanding universe, that has been enticing starting from Seers & Sages to Scientists & Literateurs. The speaker Prof. Arun Patnaik a Master in Physics, IIT Kharagpur, PhD, TIFR Mumbai hopped around the globe for sky gazing at various labs in Europe and North America, with a passion for understanding the universe. He spent quite a good number of years abroad and now settled down with a professor position in KIIT, an Institute of Eminence, Bhubaneswar, Odisha. ABSTRACT On October 19, 2017, the first interstellar object, ‘Oumuamua (mean ‘scout’ in Hawaiian language), was discovered by the Pan-STARRS survey. Surprisingly, our first interstellar guest appeared to be weird and unlike anything we have seen before. There are six peculiar properties of this visitor. - such an interstellar object should not have been discovered - originated from a special frame of reference - its velocity is unusual - reflected sunlight varied by a factor of 10 in a period of 8h => unusually elongated object - must be a shiny object, its temperature did not increase at close passage to sun - it is not a comet, no tail observed - it is like an asteroid, but unlike any asteroid of our solar system In contemplating the possibility of an artificial origin, we should keep in mind what Sherlock Holmes said: “when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” The velocity of Oumuamua suggests that there must be a push from the radiation pressure of the sunlight, called lightsail. However, for the lightsail to work, Oumuamua must be less than a mm, but size of 20m. In late 2018 Prof. Avi Loeb and his co-author Shmuel Bialy, a Harvard postdoctoral fellow, published a paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters arguing that ‘Oumuamua had been nothing less than humanity’s first contact with an artifact of extraterrestrial intelligence. Obviously such a claim did get the attention of journalists but not so much from the scientific community. In this presentation, we will discuss the details of observations of Oumuamua and the hypothesis of Loeb and Bialy as an evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. ...................................................................