![]() ![]() “It has some unusual properties compared with comets from our Solar System, though,” adds Snodgrass. Little jets of gas, caused when the comet’s ice is warmed by the Sun, could be nudging it off its natural gravitational course. “Most of the evidence points towards a comet,” says Dr Colin Snodgrass, an astronomer at the Open University. If it had a solar sail attached, pressure from the solar wind could be helping to blow it off-course.īut this idea has received a backlash from most quarters, and the object is more likely to be something entirely natural. This prompted some researchers, including Prof Avi Loeb at Harvard University, to suggest it could be an alien space probe. So what is 'Oumuamua? At first, astronomers reckoned it was an asteroid, but a closer look at its motion threw up something strange: the Sun’s gravity was not the only thing affecting its trajectory through space. In August 2018, a study using data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia telescope identified four stars that it would have passed close to in the last one to seven million years. The only conclusion is it’s an interloper that formed outside our Solar System and subsequently trekked all the way here.Įstimates suggest it entered the Solar System in the Victorian era, but astronomers don’t know exactly how long it wandered space alone before it got here. It’s travelling so fast that there’s no way it can be gravitationally bound by the Sun. So it’s no surprise that excitement started to build when, on 19 October 2017, the astronomer Dr Robert Weryk spotted an object whizzing through the Solar System while using the Pan-STARRS telescope at Haleakalā Observatory, Hawaii.ĭubbed 'Oumuamua (after the Hawaiian for ‘scout’), this object is extremely elongated, possibly up to a kilometre long but not more than 167 metres wide, making it look like a space cucumber. The pages of sci-fi books are full of alien interlopers secretly entering the Solar System to snoop on humanity as we emerge as a technologically capable race. 1 'Oumuamua Could this cucumber-shaped object be an alien spacecraft from another galaxy? © Getty ![]()
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