Messengers from the Deep

 

What beckons humans towards the stars?

I do not really remember the first time I ever felt the serene wonder one feels when looking up at the night sky; I just remember it always being there. There is something ancient in the feeling, probably left over in our genetic memory from our distant ancestors. 

A few years back, the news was abuzz with the arrival of a visitor from one of those stars. For the first time, at least in modern human memory, we identified an object that came from outside our solar system. Charmingly named “Oumuamua”, Hawaiian for “First Messenger” or “First Scout”, it was an asteroid  that originated from a distant star system and flew by Earth at dizzying speed. I will go on a tangent here and marvel at the originality of the people in charge of naming stellar objects. Ancient Polynesian explored the vast pacific ocean in tiny rafts, not knowing where or whether they will find another tiny atoll or island they started from. Now we have a scout from a vast mind boggling unknown, the way the ocean must have felt to those ancient pioneers.

But this is all an intro for, if you choose to believe it, something even more exciting. The (somewhat cartoonishly named) United States Space Force claims Oumuamua was, in fact, not the first visitor. Combining data from classified military watcher satellites and publicly available observatory data, two scientists claim a similar object of interstellar origin came by to say hello in 2014 and actually dropped in. It too was an asteroid, and, they claim, it crashed somewhere in the  South Pacific Ocean, near the Papua New Guinea island chain.

The wider scientific community is still skeptical though. The Space Force refuses to divulge the complete trajectory data for the object because it might give away information about their secret satellites. But the two scientists making the claim Amir Siraj and Avi Loeb are confident enough about their find that they are looking for funding to scrape the South Pacific Sea floor to look for the debris from the comet.  If their claim stands, and if they indeed find the pieces of the purported first asteroid, it would be one of the most exciting moments in astrophysics or indeed, human history.

So, as it is becoming clearer to us, the stars have not only been twinkling at us for all these millennia, but indeed sending their messengers to wave by, some of whom may have even stayed with us. But instead of demystifying their call, if anything, these discoveries are making us feel the ancient pull even stronger.