WE HAVE SOME BAD NEWS ABOUT THAT MYSTERIOUS OBJECT FROM ANOTHER SOLAR SYSTEM THAT WE DETECTED LAST YEAR

When a cigar-shaped interstellar object, `Oumuamua, entered our skies in October 2017, it caused quite a stir. There were even suggestions(however spurious) it could be an alien spaceship.  Well, sorry to put a dampener on any ET-type fantasies you may be harboring, but scientists have been listening out for radio signals emanating from the space rock – and heard nothing (results published in The Astrophysical Journal). So unless there are some very sneaky aliens on board keeping suspiciously quiet, we can safely assume it is definitely not an alien spacecraft. At least it means we won't have to worry about any "Independence Day" -style alien invasion just yet. (Especially as there are plenty of other things closer to home to worry about.)

Oumuamua is our first known interstellar visitor, and while its origins remain a bit of a mystery, we do know that it is roughly 10 times as long as it is wide, it measures 400 meters (1,300 feet) or more tip-to-toe, and it is a dark, reddish color. This tint is due to the cosmic rays hitting it as it travels through different star systems.

The general consensus is that `Oumuamua is an asteroid visiting our star system from a different part of space. But to thoroughly rule out the possibility we have a spacecraft manned by little green men on our hands, astronomers from Western Australia re-examined data from the Murchison Widefield Array telescope made between December and early January. At this point, `Oumuamua would have been between 95 million and 590 million kilometers (59 million and 366 million miles) away from Earth.

Instead, they reckon the most likely scenario is that it is a cometary fragment – a bit like a slab of extraterrestrial driftwood. What's more, there may be more than 46 million such interstellar objects visiting our Solar System every single year.