On the Possibility of an Artificial Origin for `Oumuamua

The first large interstellar object discovered near Earth by the Pan STARRS telescope, `Oumuamua, showed half a dozen anomalies relative to comets or asteroids in the solar system. All natural-origin interpretations of `Oumuamua's anomalies contemplated objects of a type never seen before, such as a porous cloud of dust particles, a tidal disruption fragment or exotic icebergs made of pure hydrogen or pure nitrogen. Each of these natural-origin models has major quantitative shortcomings, and so the possibility of an artificial origin for `Oumuamua must be considered. `Oumuamua's anomalies suggest that it might have been a thin craft—with a large area per unit mass—pushed by the reflection of sunlight; sharing qualities with the thin artifact 2020 SO—launched by NASA in 1966 and discovered by Pan STARRS in 2020 to exhibit a push away from the Sun with no cometary tail. The Galileo Project aims to collect new data that will identify the nature of `Oumuamua-like objects in the coming years.