Avi Loeb

No, so the first one was discovered in 2017 by a telescope in Hawaii called the Pan-STARRS.

And it was given the name Oumuamua, which means a scout in the Hawaiian language.

And that first one was anomalous in other ways, very different from Tria Atlas.

There was no gas or dust around it.

And therefore it was not a comet of the type that we are familiar with.

Definitely not a comet.

And then moreover, the brightness of the object changed by a factor of 10 as it was tumbling every eight hours.

So it meant that the object has a very extreme shape so that the surface area of the object was changing by a factor of 10 as it was tumbling.

Just think about a piece of paper that is very thin, tumbling in the wind.

And the shape of the object was most likely flat based on the variation of reflected sunlight.

And so the fact that

you know, it was tumbling and had this extreme shape, was unusual, but moreover, it exhibited an excess push away from the sun by some mysterious force, and it couldn't be the rocket effect from cometary evaporation.

Usually, you do see jets in comets, you know, that give it a boost, just like a rocket, but there was no gas or dust around Oumuamua that we detected, and so the question was,

What is pushing it?

And I said, well, maybe it's just sunlight pushing it.

And for that, the object had to be very thin, like a membrane.

And I suggested, therefore, it must be technological in origin.

It can be a surface layer that was torn apart from a technological object or a broken piece of some megastructure, like a Dyson sphere.

We don't know what it is.

We didn't get enough data on it.