Five years ago a very strange object made a very strange journey across the solar system. Astronomers were baffled by this object, but just one leading scientist was willing to say what others may only have been thinking.
Loeb’s position—that we should at least entertain the possibility that `Oumuamua is a spacecraft and investigate accordingly—has been controversial, to say the least. Now, a Chinese team is trying to dismantle one key part of Loeb’s argument: If `Oumuamua, it might be propelled by a super-thin light-sail that captures particles from stars., which has been accepted for publication in the journaland appeared on-line on Wednesday.
The argument from Shangfei and his colleagues boils down to this: Lightsails, which capture photons the way ships’ sails capture wind and are an increasingly popular way of propelling spacecraft we build here on Earth, tend to be big square things that reflect alight. It all depends on the angle to the observer as well as how much the craft they’re attached to spin.
But the sail “need not be flat,” Loeb explained. He pointed out that he’s been working with the Breakthrough Initiative, a science startup founded by Russian-Israeli billionaire Yuri Borisovich, on umbrella-shaped lightsails as part of the initiative’s Starshot space-probe project.
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