When ‘Oumuamua (oh-moo-ah-moo-ah) was discovered in 2017, it became the first known object to travel from a different solar system to our own. It’s also quite weirdly-shaped, and it’s possible that these facts are linked.
Most space-rocks, such as asteroids and comets, can be roughly described as potato-shaped – somewhat round, but definitely not spherical. ‘Oumuamua, on the other hand, is shaped more like a pencil or a short stick. It’s about 400 metres long, but only 50 metres across.
A team from China have created a computer simulation to try and explain how ‘Oumuamua became like this. They think that it might have gotten too close to its sun, where it began to melt. Gravity would have also started to break it apart and stretch the rock into a long thin tube, like what happens when you swing a water balloon around. This tube then froze in shape as it travelled further away from the star, across the universe, and into our solar system.
Lachlan Writes Science 