Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth

by Avi Loeb

Among Hawaii’s state-of-the-art telescopes are the ones that make up the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS), a network of telescopes and high-definition cameras located at an observatory atop Haleakala, the dormant volcano that forms most of the island of Maui. One of the telescopes, Pan-STARRS1, has the highest-definition camera on the planet, and since it came online, the system overall has discovered most of the near-Earth comets and asteroids found in the solar system. But Pan-STARRS has another distinction—it gathered the data that initially tipped us off to ‘Oumuamua’s existence. On October 19, astronomer Robert Weryk at the Haleakala Observatory discovered ‘Oumuamua in the data collected by the Pan-STARRS telescope, images that showed the object as a point of light speeding across the sky, moving too quickly to be bound by the Sun’s gravity. This clue quickly led the astronomy community to agree that Weryk had found the first interstellar object ever detected in our solar system.