Aliens, science and speculation in the wake of ʻOumuamua | Aeon Essays
is the public astronomer at the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of The Invisible Universe: Why There’s More to Reality than Meets the Eye (forthcoming 2021).
There’s an iconic moment, filmed in the shadow of the Very Large Array in New Mexico, that many people who visit this giant telescope try to duplicate. A young astronomer sits cross-legged on the bonnet of her car, the towering line of radio dishes vanishing into the distance behind her. With her laptop in front of her, she’s listening intently to a giant pair of headphones, held upside down so that the strap hangs below her chin. The shot is from the film Contact (1997), and the astronomer, Dr Eleanor Arroway (played by Jodie Foster), is listening, awestruck, to the first signal from an extraterrestrial intelligence. Having worked as a professional astronomer for more than a decade, I’ve met a number of colleagues for whom the film was an important part of their childhood. Many modern astronomers are driven by the ideals that Contact speaks to: the awe of discovery, and the search for company somewhere in this vast and empty Universe.
On 19 October 2017, the astronomer Robert Weryk spotted something rather extraordinary: a splinter of rock, just a few hundred metres across, tumbling through our inner solar system. Not much to write home about, you might think: there are more than 750,000 known asteroids and comets in our cosmic backyard, and countless millions more waiting to be discovered. But this object was very, very special. As his team would soon discover, this piece of flying cosmic debris could only have come from outside of our own solar system. The human race had found its first ever interstellar traveller.
