Avi Loeb

So 2017, Pan-STARRS finds a three-eye Oumuamua.

One eye.

One-eye Oumuamua, because it's the first one.

And you're still the chair of astronomy at Harvard.

You see the data and suddenly you want to write a paper about it?

What did you see in the data?

Well, it's not me.

I mean, the first report about Oumuamua was that it's very strange.

In fact, the observers argue that it must be

flat or cigar-shaped.

And the brightness is proportional to the surface area of these objects in the sky.

So if it changed by a factor of 10, it means the object must have an extreme shape.

Imagine a piece of paper tumbling in the wind.

Even though it's razor thin, the likelihood of it being edge-on is small.

the changes by a factor of 10 in the surface area means the object is unusual right and in fact the best fit to the variation of light was that of a flat object not cigar shape that is 10 times longer projected on the sky than it is wide projected in the sky and i simply suggested maybe the object is very thin because the one other fact about it

was that it was pushed away from the sun by some mysterious force without showing any evidence for gas or dust being evaporated from it.

So when it was first discovered, I said, that's strange.

Let's check if there is any radio signal coming from it.

So I suggested it to radio observers, and they checked that it doesn't transmit any radio signals at the level even of a cell phone.

But then came the second piece of evidence that it's being pushed away from the sun without the rocket effect acting on it from vapor gas.