Oumuamua

Oumuamua in Hawaiian means ‘first time visitor from far away’ . This strange object is the first interstellar body ever detected in our solar system. Astronomers discovered it last year with the Pan-STARRS1 telescope. Like all grand discoveries it has raised more questions than it answers. Where did it come from? What's it made of? Harvard astrophysicists in a recent paper even suggested that Oumuamua could be some type of alien spacecraft. Abraham Loeb said he likes the maxim of Sherlock Holmes: if you rule out the impossible whatever remains as improbable as it is must be the truth. Most astronomers think that Oumuamua is probably a stray comet from another stellar system: the only problem is that it doesn't look like any comet we've seen because it appears to lack a distinctive tail of burning gas. Another peculiarity is that as Oumuamua traveled through our solar system it didn't follow the normal path of a typical comet – subject to the gravitational pull of the sun. It slightly shifted off course: somethings which couldn't be explained by gravity alone. Perhaps some unknown force was also at play manipulating the object's behaviour Oumuamua. It is currently on its way out of the solar system near Neptune’s orbit, beyond the reach of our telescopes . Loeb already has some ideas on where to look next there should be quite a lot of them right now in the solar system – they could become trapped by Jupiter and the Sun, acting as a kind of as a fishing net, he says.