The pages of science fiction books are filled with alien visitors secretly entering the solar system to spy on humanity as we emerge as a technologically capable race, just like in Star Trek. So imagine the excitement we felt when on October 19, 2017, astronomer Robert Weryk saw an object traveling through the solar system while using the Pan-STARRS telescope at Haleakalā Observatory in Hawaii.
Nicknamed ‘Oumuamua (‘ explorer ‘in Hawaiian), this object is one of the strangest we have come across so far . It is extremely elongated, possibly up to a kilometer long but no more than 167 meters wide, making it look like some kind of space cucumber. It travels so fast that there is no way it can be gravitationally limited by the Sun. The only conclusion is that it is a cosmic intruder that formed outside our solar system.
Estimates suggest that it arrived in our solar system in the Victorian era , but astronomers don’t know exactly how long it wandered through space alone before reaching this point. In August 2018, a study using data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia telescope identified four stars that it would have passed very closely through in the last seven million years. Perhaps one of these was your star of origin.
There is no doubt that the universe is an already strange place. Our planet is a compendium of unusual flora and fauna inhabiting a blue ball covered by a thin and hard layer and covered by a thin film of gases. However, our own planet represents a small fraction of the peculiar phenomena that can be found lurking throughout the cosmos, and every day astronomers discover new surprises for us. In this gallery , we take a look at some of the most outlandish objects in space, including the curious visitor that could perhaps be a hydrogen iceberg, according to a theory put forward in June 2020 by astronomers at Yale University and the University of Chicago. Is it a new type of object?
