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Oumuamua: our first interstellar visitor

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‘Oumuamua: our first interstellar visitor

‘Oumuamua zipped through the inner solar system in 2017, revealing just how little we know about planetary systems beyond our own.
By Alison Klesman  |  Published: Wednesday, February 5, 2020
RELATED TOPICS: INTERSTELLAR OBJECTS
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Based on the light it reflected over time, astronomers have determined that ‘Oumuamua, the first identified interstellar visitor to our solar system, is red in color and several times longer than it is wide. Ron Miller for Astronomy
Sometime around the year 1837, a strange object passed an invisible cosmic mile marker: 1,000 astronomical units from the Sun. (One astronomical unit, or AU, is the average Earth-Sun distance.) For more than a century, it continued undetected toward our star. Finally, on October 19, 2017, humans noticed the visitor.That night, a faint, thin streak appeared in a 45-second-long image snapped by the University of Hawai‘i’s Pan-STARRS1 Telescope on Maui. The next morning, postdoctoral researcher Robert Weryk spotted the streak and compared it to an image taken the day before. The object was there, too. It was moving steadily across the sky, covering about 6.2° each day.

By October 22, two things were clear: The object was on a hyperbolic orbit, meaning it comes close to our Sun only once and then shoots away again, never to return. And, based on its orbit, it did not originate in our solar system at all, but instead came from another star system.

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The Rosetta spacecraft snapped this stunning image of outgassing on Comet 67P/ Churyumov–Gerasimenko in May 2015. Jets such as these could have been responsible for ‘Oumuamua’s strange acceleration as it headed away from the Sun. ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM
It was our first known interstellar visitor. Officially named 1I/2017 U1, the object is also known as ‘Oumuamua (oh-MOO-uh-MOO-uh), which means “a messenger from afar arriving first” in Hawaiian. Following its discovery, ‘Oumuamua was moving so fast that astronomers had a scant four months to observe it. After that, the object had retreated too far from the Sun, fading past our ability to track it. In just a short time, ‘Oumuamua gave us a peek at where it had come from — but it still left us with many questions unanswered.