![]() ![]() "We had to act quickly," explains team member Olivier Hainaut from ESO in Garching, Germany. The object was reclassified as an interstellar asteroid and named 1I/2017 U1 (`Oumuamua). Although originally classified as a comet, observations from ESO and elsewhere revealed no signs of cometary activity after it passed closest to the Sun in September 2017. The orbit calculations revealed beyond any doubt that this body did not originate from inside the Solar System, like all other asteroids or comets ever observed, but instead had come from interstellar space. ![]() It initially looked like a typical fast-moving small asteroid, but additional observations over the next couple of days allowed its orbit to be computed fairly accurately. 19, 2017, the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawai`i picked up a faint point of light moving across the sky.
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