First CONFIRMED interstellar visitor!
Observatories around the world have confirmed the FIRST object from another star system visited our Solar System.
Discoverers from the Pan-STARRS team dubbed it ‘Oumuamua (pronounced oh MOO-uh MOO-uh), which is Hawaiian for “a messenger from afar arriving first.”
Oumuamua is about one-quarter mile (400 meters) long and highly-elongated—perhaps 10 times as long as it is wide.
The asteroid is moving quite fast. As of today (Nov. 20), ‘Oumuamua is travelling about 85,700 miles per hour (38.3 kilometers per second) relative to the Sun. Its location is approximately 124 million miles (200 million kilometers) from Earth. That's about the same distance as Mars is to Jupiter. The asteroid is moving UP, out of the plane of the ecliptic, about 20 degrees above the plane of planets that orbit the Sun. The funky cigar shaped object passed Mars’s orbit about Nov. 1st and will pass Jupiter’s orbit sometime in May of 2018.
Read more at NASA
More from Bluefin about Space
I'd tag SteemitWorldMap, but they are still working on the Beta version of the Solar System. @martibis