Cylindrical asteroid to be probed for life

Cucumber-shaped object’s speed, odd path spur curiosity

Our solar system has a visitor. It’s cylindrical, dark and reddish, a quarter-mile long. The object won’t be staying. This fall, astronomers announced that the thing came blazing into our neck of the galaxy at speeds of up to 196,000 mph. It is now headed away as quickly as it came.

The object’s trajectory is so strange and its speeds are so blistering that it probably did not originate from within our solar system. Its discoverers concluded that the object is a rare interstellar traveler from beyond our solar system, the first object of its kind observed by humans.

Astronomers at the University of Hawaii, who discovered the object with the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope, said the visitor was an asteroid. In October, they named the asteroid ‘Oumuamua — Hawaiian for “messenger.” ‘Oumuamua, which appears rocky or metallic, lacks the characteristics of a comet.

Some scientists, though they are swift to say ‘Oumuamua is probably natural, have not yet ruled out more extraordinary origins. “The possibility that this object is, in fact, an artificial object — that it is a spaceship, essentially — is a remote possibility,” Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Research Center, told The Washington Post on Monday.

Siemion is a member of the Breakthrough Listen initiative: a $100 million project, backed by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, to hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence. This week, researchers with the Breakthrough Listen initiative announced that a radio telescope will probe ‘Oumuamua for signs of technology. The telescope, nestled within the hills of the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, begins its search on Wednesday.

‘Oumuamua behaves oddly. Planets and asteroids circle the sun on the same plane, like water swirling around a basin. ‘Oumuamua dipped into the solar system from outside the plane, as if leaked from a cosmic faucet.

It is shaped strangely, too. Most asteroids of this size are spherical. This object has the proportions of a giant cucumber. In fact, Harvard University astronomer Avi Loeb recently told Milner that ‘Oumuamua has the optimal design of a vessel meant to travel through space, the Atlantic reported.

Yet all of its features are “entirely consistent with being a natural object,” said Karen Meech, the University of Hawaii astronomer who led the research team to measure ‘Oumuamua’s physical properties. “That being said, we cannot disprove the unlikely hypothesis that it is not.”

Astronomers across the planet have turned their sensors at the object. The European Southern Observatory followed up on the initial Hawaiian detection from Chile, peering at ‘Oumuamua through the Very Large Telescope in Chile.