A highly unusual object was spotted traveling through the solar system in 2017. Given a Hawaiian name, ʻOumuamua, it was small and elongated – a few hundred meters by a few tens of meters, traveling at a speed fast enough to escape the Sun’s gravity and move into interstellar space. I was at a meeting when the discovery of ʻOumuamua was announced, and a friend immediately said to me, “So how long before somebody claims it’s a spaceship?” It seems that whenever astronomers discover anything unusual, somebody claims it must be aliens. Nearly all scientists believe that ʻOumuamua probably originates…
This story continues at The Next Web