This artist’s impression shows the first interstellar asteroid: `Oumuamua. This unique object was discovered on 19 October 2017 by the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawai`i. Subsequent observations from ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile and other observatories around the world show that it was travelling through space for millions of years before its chance encounter with our star system. `Oumuamua seems to be a dark red highly-elongated metallic or rocky object, about 400 metres long, and is unlike anything normally found in the Solar System.
Not long ago, a piece of that unknown came to visit us in the form of a mysterious object from a distant star. And an astronomer noticed something unusual about his discovery. Most asteroids follow a predictable orbit around the sun, but the object he would later dub Oumuamua, was behaving unusually as it darted through space, not too far away from Earth.
