The Story of the Interstellar Space Rock Isn’t Over Yet
Astronomers have some new information about ‘Oumuamua—and it makes tracing its origins even harder.
If you’ve been walking around thinking that the mysterious, interstellar space rock that astronomers discovered last year is an asteroid, I have some news for you: It’s probably a comet.
There is, of course, the chance that you haven’t been thinking about this space rock, or know the difference between a comet or an asteroid, or why any of it matters. So let’s return to October 2017, when an astronomer named Rob Weryk was looking at the observations recorded by a telescope perched on top of a volcano in Hawaii.
Weryk’s job, as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, is to sort through the telescope’s nightly observations and identify objects passing near Earth. During one of his data
