Oumuamua is it a needle shaped spacecraft?

Intelligent life may have entered our Universe

Scientists have been watching 'Oumuamua, the first known interstellar asteroid, with fascination since it landed on their screens in October. And beginning on Wednesday, a team will be studying it in search of something that would make the object even more groundbreaking: signals indicating it is in communication with extraterrestrial intelligent life (could be useful in this universe!).

That decision is based in large part on its weird shape: The object looks like a cigar, about 10 times longer than it is wide. That's different from every other object scientists have ever seen in space, which has raised a lot of eyebrows in the astronomical community. "The very first one looks completely different from the asteroids we're used to," Avi Loeb, an astronomer at Harvard University who suggested (and is working on) the new observations, told Newsweek.

Can you hear major Tom

Astronomers searching for signals from alien civilisations have detected 15 powerful, repeated radio pulses coming from a dwarf galaxy 3 billion light years away from Earth.

Copyright johnworacker.com

Astronomers searching for signals from alien civilisations have detected 15 powerful, repeated radio pulses coming from a dwarf galaxy 3 billion light years away from Earth.

The source of the mysterious signals, known as fast radio bursts, is unknown. Some have proposed they could be emanating from black holes or rotating neutron stars with extremely strong magnetic fields. A more speculative possibility is that they are beacons from extraterrestrial spacecraft.

The signals were picked up by the Breakthrough Listen project, a $100m (£77m) initiative to find signs of intelligent life in the universe set up by Professor Stephen Hawking and Russian internet billionaire Yuri Milner.

Hannah Devlin Science correspondent

@hannahdev

Friday 1 September 2017 18.38 BST published in The Guardian on line

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