Oumuamua is the first known interstellar object to pass through the Solar System.

Formally designated
1I/2017 U1, it was discovered by Robert Weryk using the Pan-STARRS telescope at Haleakala
Observatory, Hawaii, on 19 October 2017, 40 days after it passed its closest point to the Sun. When first
seen, it was about 33,000,000 km (21,000,000 mi; 0.22 AU) from Earth (about 85 times as far away as
the Moon), and already heading away from the Sun. Initially assumed to be a comet, it was reclassified
as an asteroid a week later, then as the first of a new class of astronomical objects.

Although it looks like an asteroid, the first interstellar object spotted passing through the solar system,
called 'Oumuamua, may be more like a comet in disguise.

When astronomers first spotted the oblong, tumbling interstellar object 'Oumuamua passing through
the solar system in October, they were surprised — not only did it come from outside the solar system,
according to its trajectory, it seemed to be an asteroid, rather than the comet researchers thought was
more likely for an interstellar visitor.

However, a new paper suggests 'Oumuamua may be made of ice, like a comet, just disguised with a
protective crust. ['Oumuamua: The Solar System's First Interstellar Visitor in Photos]

This view of the interstellar object 'Oumuamua was captured by the 4.2-meter William Herschel
Telescope in La Palma in Spain's Canary Islands. A. Fitzsimmons, QUB/Isaac Newton Group, La Palma.

According to professor Alan Fitzsimmons from the Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland, there is
much more "icy stuff than rocky stuff" in the solar system, making it more likely for emissaries from
other systems to also be icy, if other solar systems evolved in the same way.

"We know that our solar system has ejected many more icy bodies then rocky bodies," Fitzsimmons,
lead author of the paper published today (Dec. 18) in the journal Nature Astronomy, told Space.com.

As the solar system formed, planets made of gas and ice near the outer edges of the solar system
ejected trillions of objects, Fitzsimmons said. In addition, the mass of small icy bodies at the outermost
reaches of the solar system, known as the Oort cloud, has lost objects over billions of years due to
gravitational disruption from other stars. It was therefore logical for astronomers to expect that the first
interstellar visitor they would see should be a comet.

"Given that this object passed relatively close to our sun as it was travelling through our solar system,
one would expect any ices on the surface to basically be heated and it should behave like a comet,"
Fitzsimmons said. "We should see gas streaming off the surface, we should see dust particles being
ejected in the cometary atmosphere, perhaps even a tail."
But astronomers observing 'Oumuamua with their telescopes have seen no signs of such a behavior.
They concluded that the object must be rocky in nature — an asteroid. However, when Fitzsimmons and
his colleagues examined data on the surface of the object more closely, they found it doesn't look like a
typical asteroid either.

"We didn't see any signs of typical spectroscopic signatures that you would expect from the minerals on
the surface of an asteroid we see in our solar system," Fitzsimmons said. "It rather seems to resemble
the [icy] objects that are there in the outer solar system. That kind of got our head scratching. If the
object had, originally at least, ice in it, what's happened to it?"

Fitzsimmons and his colleagues looked at older studies and laboratory experiments that tried to find out
what happens to icy bodies, such as comets, that are exposed for a long time to energetic particles and
cosmic rays. These studies suggest that the ice from the surface layers of such bodies evaporates
because of the cosmic environment.

NASA Says '3200 Phaethon' Asteroid Won't Hit Earth. Here's What Could Happen If It Did.

"What gets left transforms itself into a relatively rigid and desiccated surface held together by carbon
compounds, which at the same time gives a sort of a reddish, pinkish color," Fitzsimmons said. "And
that's what we saw in our spectra." [Living on a Comet: 'Dirty Snowball' Facts Explained (Infographic)]

The astronomers ran a series of computer experiments to model the behavior of the now icy
'Oumuamua. They found that if the object's crust was only 20 inches (50 centimeters) thick, it would
protect the ice at the object's core from the heat of the sun, thus preventing it from displaying the
telltale signs of gas and dust leaving a comet.

In a separate paper that will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters later this month,
Fitzsimmons' colleague Michele Bannister, also from Queen's University, looked at further properties of
'Oumuamua in the near-infrared spectrum and compared the data with those on similar objects in the
outer solar system. She found staggering similarities.

"We've discovered that this is a planetesimal with a well-baked crust that looks a lot like the tiniest
worlds in the outer regions of our solar system," Bannister said in a statement. "It has a greyish/red
surface and is highly elongated, probably about the size and shape of the Gherkin skyscraper in London."

While 'Oumuamua's arrival has been one of the most significant astronomical events of 2017,
Fitzsimmons and Bannister expect that such occurrences will become rather common in the future.
Similar objects likely make it into the solar system fairly regularly, the astronomers said, but they are
usually too faint to spot with current telescopes. As telescope technology advances, Fitzsimmons said he
expects that astronomers in the not so distant future will be able to study such interlopers perhaps
every year

"On the horizon we have a new telescope facility they are building at the moment called the Large
Synoptic Survey Telescope in Chile," Fitzsimmons said.

"That's going to be an incredibly powerful survey machine. When that starts operating in the first half of
the next decade, that will have a much better chance of detecting these objects in the solar system than
the current facilities that we have."