What's Up? The Space Place

Hey Space Placers! Take a few minutes to read this great Washington Post article   about the top astronomer at Harvard University who thinks it is a distinct possibility that an alien space ship flew through our solar system in the form of ' Oumuamua' which I blogged about  previously. My position is that ANYTHING is possible in this Universe we live in. BUT you have to have peer reviewed data to back up your theories and claims. Professor Loeb has published a paper on the subject, and like Carl Sagan before him, has run afoul of his peers due to the  publicity and controversial nature of his claim.  Good for him and us......we need scientists of his caliber who are not afraid to say what they think based upon their interpretation of data. Good for him and us that the peer review process and the scientific process is at work to chew upon his work and move forward to gather more data. Here's to more data and to another  Oumuamua passing throug...

Hey Space Placers! If you recall we recently had a visitor to the solar system that came from interstellar space. NASA and others released yesterday information on the SHAPE of the asteroid and to put it mildly, it is out of this world! For the first time ever astronomers have studied an asteroid that has entered the Solar System from interstellar space. Observations from ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile and other observatories around the world show that this unique object was traveling through space for millions of years before its chance encounter with our star system. It appears to be a dark, reddish, highly-elongated rocky or high-metal-content object. The new results appear in the journal Nature on 20 November 2017. Here's NASA's take on the strangely shaped interstellar visitor. For those of us who are sci-fi fans this is manna from heaven because the physical shape of  Oumuamua conjures up the Monolith from '2001' and '2010', ...