Then not long after 'Oumuamua appeared, something unexpected happened: they found another one. But though there are hundreds of specialist instruments scanning the skies each night, from a snow-battered telescope at the South Pole to the sun-baked Atacama Large Millimeter Array (Alma) in the Chilean Andes, none had ever been spotted. Scientists had suspected for decades that our solar system might be regularly visited by these intergalactic voyagers, many of which are thought to have been roaming among the stars for billions of years. Was it a block of solid hydrogen? Could it have been a cosmic "dust bunny" – a giant space version of the clumps of hair and debris often found under living room furniture? Or was it, as the esteemed Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb suggested, an artificial construction made by an intelligent extra-terrestrial civilisation? Over the years that followed, scientific journals and global media headlines swarmed with speculation. Before 'Oumuamua, the most elongated known space objects were three times longer than they were wide. The second was its peculiar shape – by some estimates, it was 10 times as long as it was wide. The first was its mysterious acceleration away from the Sun, which was hard to reconcile with many ideas about what it might have been made of. Two things in particular fixated scientists. This was no ordinary comet or asteroid, it was an interstellar visitor from a distant, unidentified solar system – the first to have ever been found.Īppropriately for an object with such alien origins, it soon became clear that 'Oumuamua was suitably strange.
Robert Weryk, the astronomer at the University of Hawaii who first detected it, knew immediately from its speed that he was looking at something new to physics. This space anomaly was named ' Oumuamua – pronounced oh-moo-uh-moo-uh – Hawaiian for "a messenger from afar arriving first". Possibly shaped like an elongated cigar, possibly formed into an uncannily spaceship-like disc, by the time it was spotted it had already zipped by our own Sun, performed a slick hairpin turn, and begun hurtling off in another direction. Tumbling through space at 57,000mph (90,000 kmph), the object is thought to have come from the direction of Vega, an alien star that resides 147 trillion miles (237 trillion km) away. It emerged from the celestial void in October 2017 – a tiny bright speck on the telescope at Haleakalā Observatory, Hawaii.
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