A visitor from outer space

Scientists have spent years looking for alien life, but what if it found us first?

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In October 2017, astronomer Robert Weryk saw a mysterious stick-shaped object with a faint reddish tint, located just 21 million miles from Earth (a relatively small distance in the vastness of space). He was using the Pan-STARRS1 telescope at the Haleakala Observatory in Hawaii, US, which looks for “near Earth” objects. This unexpected visitor was named ‘Oumuamua (say “oh-mu-ah-muah”), a Hawaiian word meaning “a messenger from afar arriving first”. It was the first known object from another solar system to visit our solar system, and the discovery raised many questions. Was this mysterious rock an asteroid, a comet, or perhaps something more extraordinary, like an alien spaceship?