The "wiretapping" was organized to prove that the "first interstellar asteroid" is a man-made object.
Astronomers from the Search Institute for Extraterrestrial Civilizations (SETI) have come to believe that the "first interstellar asteroid" is an alien ship. And they tried to prove it. 42 dishes of the radio telescope - the so-called The Allen Telescope Array (ATA) - were listening to Oumuamua from November 23 to December 5, 2017.
“We were looking for a signal that would indicate that the object is of artificial origin, that it is high-tech,” says Gerry Harp, who organized the “communication session” - quoted by the SETI website. - But I didn't manage to catch anything like that. Although the sensitivity of our equipment was the highest.
Allen's telescope, whose saucers were picking up signals from an alien.
As Harp emphasized, “failure” does not mean that Oumuamua cannot be a man-made object. That is, by a spacecraft or an automatic probe of aliens.
The signal was searched for in the frequency range from 1 to 10 Gigahertz with a resolution of 100 Kilohertz. Oumuamua at that time was 275 million kilometers from Earth - this is approximately the diameter of our planet's orbit. Long away. However, astronomers assure: if a transmitter with a power of at least 30 milliwatts worked on the "interstellar asteroid" - like a cell phone, a radio telescope would detect it.
On December 13, 2017, astronomers working on the Breakthrough Listen project of Russian billionaire Yuri Milner made an attempt to contact Oumuamua. Not so long ago, he donated $ 100 million to find brothers in mind.
The signals from the "interstellar asteroid" were caught on the 110-meter antenna of the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, USA. The four receivers of the telescope - L, S, X and C - worked in different ranges - from 1 to 12 GHz, covering several billion channels. The amount of data received was 90 terabytes (TB).
Promotional video:
So far, the observatory computer cluster processed the array accumulated in the S receiver, which covered frequencies from 1.7 to 2.6 Gigahertz. Signals from Oamuamua have not been identified.
Scientists have posted the data of the S receiver in the public domain. Anyone can analyze them on their own. And check if the scientists missed what they so wanted to find.
The processing of the data from the other three receivers appears to be ongoing. At least astronomers did not report on the completion of such a laborious work, they did not make final conclusions.
Who knows if at least some "intelligent" signals will suddenly appear? And the hopes of those who seek them will come true.
REFERENCE
The messenger who arrived first from afar. What is special about it?
The object, moving towards the Sun at a tremendous speed of 87.3 kilometers per second, was first detected by astronomers from the University of Hawaii on October 19, 2017. The trajectory of the "alien" indicated that it was flying from some other star system.
The guest was officially recognized as an asteroid, but it was named very ambiguously, with a clear hint of brothers in mind - Oumuamua. “The messenger who arrived first from afar” means this in Hawaiian.
Oumuamua rotates, making one revolution in 7 hours 18 minutes. And at the same time it changes the brightness. After analyzing the nature of the change, scientists realized that the shape of the object is strange - not "asteroidal" at all. Oumuamua is highly elongated and resembles a cigar, which is about 10 times its diameter.
The length of the "cigar" was originally estimated at 400 meters, and the diameter, respectively, at 40 meters. Then they clarified that Oumuamua is twice as long - 800 meters. Its surface is hard, with complex relief, perhaps even metal. In a word, not an asteroid, but some kind of starship.
This is how Oumuamua looks to the skeptics.
Dr. Jason Wright, an astronomer at Penn State University, was the first to suggest that Oumuamua is a spacecraft. He suffered an accident, became uncontrollable, moves by inertia, at random, and somersaults.
A bold hypothesis, surprisingly, was supported by NASA experts. In their press release, they said that the object, approaching the solar system, accelerated from time to time - like a spaceship that turned on its engines.
This is how enthusiasts see an interstellar asteroid.
In November of this year, the fantastic version of the man-made origin of Oumuamua received another solid reinforcement - from astronomers at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Through complex calculations, they proved that the object was accelerated by the space sail: a kind of strong metallized film of a huge area, about 0.5 millimeters thick. Filled with the rays of the stars, like the wind, this film created the thrust - due to the light pressure. Who turned Oumuamua into a sailboat? Extraterrestrials, of course.
A large group of scientists from several of the world's leading scientific and astronomical centers have estimated the trajectory of Oumuamua. We looked at where it could start. It turned out that most likely the "alien" flew out of the vicinity of the red dwarf HIP 3757, which is located in the constellation Cetus 77 light-years from the Sun. But it could also start from the Sun-like star HD 292249 from the constellation Unicorn. It is 135 light years away.
Oumuamua flew away. And he did not promise to return.
VLADIMIR LAGOVSKY
