The WIYN Telescope at Kitt Peak imaged 1I/2017 U1 tracking across the sky; the asteroid appears about 10 million times fainter than the very faintest star visible with the naked eye.



R. Kotulla (University of Wisconsin) & WIYN/NOAO/AURA/NSF



New illustrations of interstellar asteroid Oumuamua are not going to do anything to dissuade those who think it should have been named 'Rama' instead. https://t.co/6fexQcMGHk pic.twitter.com/vekr57Y88K — Corey S. Powell (@coreyspowell) November 20, 2017

The first discovered interstellar asteroid to come through our solar system has quite an unusual shape.1I/2017 U1, which has since been named `Oumuamua, swept past Earth last month. Its bizarre trajectory seemed to indicate that it wasn’t in orbit around the Sun, meaning it came from elsewhere — and it was headed back out to parts unknown.Observations from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope revealed that the asteroid is an oblong, reddish, solid chunk of rock or metal. Initially identified as a comet, it has since given no indication of a tail and has been officially reclassified as an interstellar asteroid. It’s 10 times longer than it is wide, and is nearly a quarter-mile (400 meters) long. It came from the same region of the sky now occupied by Vega, but that star was in a different position 300,000 years ago when this asteroid would have passed through the region.In fact, we may never know quite where it came from.Corey S. Powell, an editor at OMNI and Aeon, compared that shape to Rama from Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendevouz with Rama, while Eric Betz of our sister publication Discover magazine likened it to the alien probe from Star Trek IV: oblong and rocky. (`Oumuamua probably wasn’t an alien probe, though, and it definitely wasn’t looking for whales.)