Taking a Gamble on Anomalies in the Sky
One of the greatest benefits of the new Rubin Observatory is that its wide field survey is capable of detecting rare, never-seen-before anomalies in the sky. Scientific revolutions start as anomalies which do not conform with traditional ideas. Even one robust example of this nature is sufficient to revolutionize humanity’s world model. Galileo’s telescope revealed the moons of Jupiter as an anomaly that challenged the geocentric model of the natural world. The Pan-STARRS telescope revealed `Oumuamua as a potential anomaly for the human-centric model of the technological world. Will the Rubin observatory substantiate this anomaly by discovering robust evidence for extraterrestrial space trash?
It would be wise for young astronomers in the post-Rubin era to focus their careers on the study of Rubin anomalies if they wish to serve as the prominent successors of Galileo. For that purpose, they have to adopt the mindset of “otroverts” who see what others don’t and resist group identity and social conformity, as discussed in the new book by Rami Kaminski “The Gift of Not Belonging: How Outsiders Thrive in a World of Joiners.” Established members of academia maintain their status by creating echo chambers in which they encourage young scholars to preach their gospel. As a result, fledgling scientists often hesitate to promote anomalies for the fear of being treated as heretics. This cultivates a semi-religious culture of science, in which anomalies are brushed under the carpet of traditional thinking.
There are three categories of astronomers who vigorously object to the search for extraterrestrial technological space trash. The first group involves those who signal their loyalty to the mainstream by bullying otroverts and pressuring their students or postdocs to abandon this line of research. The second involves those who claim that they do not believe anomalous data, like the possibility that the meteor IM1 detected on January 8, 2014 was interstellar based on the data tabulated in NASA’s CNEOS catalog of fireballs. The third category includes those who suggest that anomalous objects, like `Oumuamua, belong to a solar-system class of “dark comets” of natural origin. Ironically, these dark comets are now being recognized as human-made space debris with a non-gravitational acceleration as a result of radiation pressure from the Sun. The recent papers posted here and here based on my earlier work, reverse the argument of this third class of skeptics and suggest that if the anomalous non-gravitational acceleration of `Oumuamua is similar to that of dark comets, then it is likely to be of extraterrestrial technological origin. In such a case, the comet experts shot themselves in the foot with this association.
Follow-up observations of anomalous interstellar objects from the Rubin Observatory could take advantage of the Webb telescope and ground-based telescopes to demonstrate that they are technological in origin based on various characteristics, such as anomalous propulsion, anomalous shape or anomalous thermal properties.
The Rubin Observatory is limited to objects that reflect sunlight or generate their own light. Could there be another class of stealth objects that have a low electromagnetic signature, in the spirit of the recently used B-2 bombers? If so, we could still detect these dark objects by their gravitational signal, which cannot be hidden.
In a new paper that I just completed with the brilliant graduate student Valentin Thoss, we studied the limits attainable by existing and future gravitational-wave observatories on dark objects which pass through the solar system. We have found that if the cosmological dark matter is made of compact invisible objects in the mass range of 10 to 100,000 tons, then these objects will be detectable with the future gravitational wave space observatory, DECIGO (Deci-hertz Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory), planned for launch in the 2030s by the Japanese Space Agency, JAXA.
This gravitational detection technique is also sensitive to speeds that cannot be recorded by the Rubin Observatory camera. Dark matter objects from the halo of the Milky-Way are expected to stream through the solar system at speeds that are an order of magnitude faster than common asteroids or comets near Earth. But motion of relativistic spacecraft close to the speed of light, as envisioned in the Breakthrough Starshot Project that I led over the past decade, is a thousand times faster than that of halo objects and would not be traceable by electromagnetic observatories even if the moving objects were extremely bright. The new paper that I wrote with Valentin shows that future gravitational wave detectors would be able to record the gravitational signal from relativistic objects with a mass of order a million tons, as I already discussed in a research note last year.
One could argue that the search for extraterrestrial artifacts in the sky is a gamble, and hence future observatories should be located in Las Vegas. In that case, what happens in Vegas will not stay in Vegas. Data sharing is an essential facet of scientific discoveries.
I recently received an email from a fan who confessed to have had a dream about an encounter with extraterrestrials after reading my book Extraterrestrial. I noted in reply that sometimes our dreams do come true. We just have to pay attention to their appearance as anomalies in the data streams from the Rubin or DECIGO observatories.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
