In 2017, astronomers spotted the first object ever confirmed to have come from another star system passing through our own: a strange, elongated visitor called ‘Oumuamua that seemed to accelerate as it left, in a way scientists are still debating

In 2017, astronomers spotted the first object ever confirmed to have come from another star system passing through our own: a strange, elongated visitor called ‘Oumuamua that seemed to accelerate as it left, in a way scientists are still debating

In October 2017, a survey telescope on Maui caught a faint, fast point of light that did not belong here. The object was moving too quickly, on the wrong kind of orbit, to have formed around our Sun. It had come from somewhere else, passed close to the Sun a few weeks earlier, and was already on its way back out. The object was found on 19 October 2017 by Robert Weryk, working with the Pan-STARRS1 telescope run by the University of Hawaii and fu…