NBC News by David Freeman / Jul.01.2018
Astronomers say the cigar-shaped interstellar visitor isn't an asteroid, but a comet.
When astronomers first spied a weird cigar-shaped object speeding past the sun last October, they could tell from its path that it had come from another star system — but they didn't know exactly what it was.
Now they know. A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature indicates that the interstellar visitor, dubbed Oumuamua, is neither an asteroid nor an alien spacecraft (as some wags had suggested) but a small interstellar comet.
"It's the only such object discovered so far," Marco Micheli, an astronomer with the European Space Agency and the lead author of the new study, told NBC News MACH in an email.
---But not everyone is buying that explanation — at least not completely.
Alan Jackson, an astronomer at the University of Toronto Scarborough, told MACH in an email that if Oumuamua is a comet, it must be one that lost much of its ice before leaving its home star system.---
More:
https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/mysterious-oumuamua-space-object-has-finally-been-identified-ncna887821
