Astronomers Alan Jackson and Stephen Desh, of Arizona State University, reported that the 150-foot-long object appears to be made of frozen nitrogen, like the surface of Pluto, and Neptune’s largest moon, Triton.
They say it was an icy planet covered in nitrogen more than 500 million years ago causing part of the planet to tear apart and move toward our star system. Astronomers previously determined that Oumuamua was not of our solar system because its speed and path suggested that the “cookie” wasn’t orbiting the sun or anything else in our system.
Not everyone agrees with the new findings. Harvard University’s Avi Loeb confirms that the body appears more artificial than normal. In other words, something from an alien civilization, like a light sail, for example. And he recently wrote another book on the topic named Extraterrestrial: the first sign of intelligent life outside Earth.
Whatever it was, Oumuamua is now more than 3 billion kilometers from Earth and too small to be seen, even with the Hubble Space Telescope. Jackson said astronomers need to build themselves on the original observations and hope they will continue to refine their analyzes.
The only other space object that has been confirmed to have drifted from another star system into ours is Comet 21 / Borisov, which was discovered in 2019.
