Oumuamua, the first recorded object from outside the solar system
Oumuamua was
first spotted on October 19th by astronomers working on the Pan STARRS
telescope in Hawaii. The telescope is used to scan the sky for objects orbiting
near Earth, looking for any that might pose a threat to our planet. But one of
the rocks in the latest observations looked as if it might not belong in our
neck of the Universe.
The team at Pan
STARRS continued observing the object over the next couple of days. Based on
their measurements, they were fairly certain that they were watching the first
ever interstellar asteroid. Up until then, such a distant visitor had never
been seen before, so observatories all over the world started following the
object, too, in order to calculate its path and figure out its shape.
Interstellar
asteroids are thought to be rejects from other planetary systems. When our
Solar System first formed, for instance, the giant planets tossed around all
the smaller bits of material circulating around the Sun, some of which landed
in the outer edges of the Solar System while others were ejected from our
neighborhood completely. These outcasts then traveled through interstellar
space, possibly passing by other stars. Conceivably, ejected material from
other planetary systems must make their way to our Solar System once in a
while, says Meech.
Such
interstellar objects are thought to pass through our Solar System pretty
frequently, but they’re usually moving too fast, and they’re usually too faint
to see. With `Oumuamua, astronomers got lucky: the asteroid entered our Solar
System at an angle, coming in close by the Sun, and then passed by Earth on its
way out of the Solar System. That gave astronomers the chance to catch it with
ground-based telescopes. “I think it’s really neat that we had this visitor,
however briefly, and we had a chance to look at it up close,” says Meec
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