The alien civilization that created the probes would not need to be on the mothership. From a distance, Venus, Earth and Mars would all look appealing, with Earth being of greatest interest once aliens found signatures of liquid water. "Equipped with a large surface-to-mass ratio of a parachute, technological 'dandelion seeds' could slow down in the Earth’s atmosphere to avoid burnup and then pursue their objectives wherever they land," they wrote.Īliens would likely want to explore rocky planets with an atmosphere in the solar system, the authors propose.
The authors suggest the dandelion seed probes could reach Earth for exploration without being detected by astronomers as they would likely be too small to reflect enough sunlight for survey telescopes to detect. In the draft paper, Loeb and Kirkpatrick looked at Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs, the government's preferred term for UFOs) confined by known physics. could be separated from the parent craft by the tidal gravitational force of the Sun or by a maneuvering capability." That coincidence inspired him "to consider the possibility that an artificial interstellar object could potentially be a parent craft that releases many small probes during its close passage to Earth, an operational construct not too dissimilar from NASA missions," Loeb told Live Science in an email. (Image credit: Bjorn Bakstad via Getty Images) The interloper 'Oumuamua continues to puzzle astronomers and astrophysicists.
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