K.J.M., J.T.K. and J.V.K. acknowledge support through NSF awards AST1413736 and AST1617015, in addition to support for HST programmes GO/DD-15405 and -15447 provided by NASA through a grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. R.J.W. and R.W. acknowledge support through NASA under grant NNX14AM74G issued to support Pan-STARRS1 through the SSO Near Earth Object Observation Program. D.F., P.W.C. and A.E.P. conducted this research at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with NASA. We thank S. Sheppard for obtaining the Magellan observations, and E. J. Christensen, W. H. Ryan and M. Mommert for providing astrometric uncertainty information related to the Catalina Sky Survey, Magdalena Ridge Observatory and Discovery Channel Telescope observations of ‘Oumuamua. This work is based on observations obtained at CFHT, which is operated by the National Research Council of Canada, the Institut National des Sciences de l’Univers of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique of France and the University of Hawai‘i . It is based in part on observations collected at the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere under ESO programme 2100.C-5008(A) and in part on observations obtained under programme GS-2017B-DD-7 obtained at the Gemini Observatory, which is operated by AURA under cooperative agreement with the NSF on behalf of the Gemini partnership: NSF (United States), NRC (Canada), CONICYT (Chile), MINCYT (Argentina) and MCT (Brazil). This is work is also based on observations made with NASA/ESA HST, obtained at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. This work has made use of data from the ESA mission Gaia (https://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia), processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC; https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dpac/consortium). Funding for DPAC has been provided by national institutions, in particular the institutions participating in the Gaia Multilateral Agreement.

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Nature thanks A. Fitzsimmons, M. Granvik and the other anonymous reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.