More evocatively, it was dubbed ‘Oumuamua (pronounced “oh-mooah-mooah”), from the Hawaiian, meaning, roughly, “scout.”Įven interstellar objects have to obey the law of gravity, but ‘Oumuamua raced along as if propelled by an extra force. In the dry nomenclature of the International Astronomical Union, it became known as 1I/2017 U1. It was an “interstellar object”-a visitor from far beyond the solar system that was just passing through. The bright dot, astronomers concluded, was something never before seen.

Instead of swinging around the sun on an elliptical path, it was zipping away more or less in a straight line. Either it was long and skinny, like a cosmic cigar, or flat and round, like a celestial pizza. As it tumbled through space, its brightness varied so much-by a factor of ten-that it had to have a very odd shape. The object was small, with an area roughly that of a city block. The more they looked, the more puzzling its behavior seemed. Weryk alerted colleagues, who began tracking the dot from other observatories. The dot of light that caught Weryk’s attention was moving more than four times that speed, at almost two hundred thousand miles per hour. It’s designed to hunt for “near-Earth objects,” which are mostly asteroids whose paths bring them into our planet’s astronomical neighborhood and which travel at an average velocity of some forty thousand miles an hour. The telescope is situated atop Haleakalā, a ten-thousand-foot volcanic peak on the island of Maui, and it scans the sky each night, recording the results with the world’s highest-definition camera. On October 19, 2017, a Canadian astronomer named Robert Weryk was reviewing images captured by a telescope known as Pan- STARRS1 when he noticed something strange.

Alien glyphs theorist gateway