It sounds like something plucked straight from the pages of a high-concept science fiction novel: a Harvard professor, a celebrated scientist, claims the first interstellar visitor detected in our solar system was not a dead chunk of rock, but potentially a piece of alien technology. Professor Avi Loeb, the former Chair of Astronomy at Harvard University, has found himself not just at the forefront of this sensational hypothesis, but in open warfare with the scientific establishment he once led.
Loeb has now intensified the row, sensationally calling out what he sees as an 'irrational' and 'anti-intellectual' bias against his research into the true nature of the object, 1I/'Oumuamua. This is not some far-flung anomaly; it is an interstellar object that arrived in our solar system from a distant star and exhibited baffling characteristics that scientists are still struggling to explain.
