The discovery in October 2017 of a bizarre, cigar-shaped object hurtling through our Solar System set imaginations racing. Was it an asteroid? A comet? Or an alien spaceship, sent here on a reconnaissance mission? Named ‘Oumuamua, it joined a select group of cosmic enigmas and celestial oddities that have astronomers scratching their heads…
‘OUMUAMUA
Could this cucumber-shaped object be an alien spacecraft from another galaxy?
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. 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 HaleakalÄ Observatory, Hawaii.
Dubbed ‘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. It’s travelling so fast that there’s no way it can be gravitationally bound by the Sun. The only conclusion is it’s an interloper that formed outside our Solar System and subsequently trekked all the way here. Estimates 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. 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. Perhaps one of these was its home star.
この記事は BBC Earth の February 2019 版に掲載されています。
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この記事は BBC Earth の February 2019 版に掲載されています。
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