Our Solar System’s First Known Interstellar Object Gets Unexpected Speed Boost

Using observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based observatories, an international team of scientists have confirmed ′Oumuamua (oh-MOO-ah-MOO-ah), the first known interstellar object to travel through our solar system, got an unexpected boost in speed and shift in trajectory as it passed through the inner solar system last year.

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Credits: NASA/ESA/STScI

This illustration shows ‘Oumuamua racing toward the outskirts of our solar system. As the complex rotation of the object makes it difficult to determine the exact shape, there are many models of what it could look like.

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Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

'Oumuamua was too small to appear as anything more than a point of light, even in the largest telescopes. But we know that it must be a highly elongated object because it varied dramatically in brightness over every seven-to-eight-hour period.

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Observatories including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope found that the interstellar object named ‘Oumuamua gained an extra boost of speed, which likely comes from comet-like jets of gas.