‘Oddball’ asteroid scouts our solar system

It came from outer space.

For the first time, astronomers discovered an asteroid that’s entered our solar system from interstellar space. The object is shaped like a cigar and is about a quarter-mile long.

“This thing is an oddball,” said Karen Meech of the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy, who led an international team that studied the interstellar interloper.

Although the object is similar in composition to some objects in our solar system, its long shape is unlike anything found around our sun.

“For decades, we’ve theorized that such interstellar objects are out there, and now — for the first time — we have direct evidence they exist,” NASA’s Thomas Zurbuchen said in a statement.

Named Oumuamua (Hawaiian for “scout” or “messenger”), the asteroid may have wandered through our Milky Way galaxy, unattached to any star system, for hundreds of millions of years before its chance encounter with our own solar system, according to astronomers.

This “reflects the way this object is like a scout or messenger sent from the distant past to reach out to us,” the authors wrote in a study that was published Monday in the British journal Nature.

The asteroid was first spotted in October by Meech’s team using the PanSTARRS1 telescope atop Mount Haleakala in Maui, Hawaii.

“What a fascinating discovery this is,” said Paul Chodas of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “It’s a strange visitor from a faraway star system, shaped like nothing we’ve ever seen in our own solar system neighborhood.”