Rob WaughContributorYahoo News UKJune 2, 2020, 11:43 AM CDT
The space rock named `Oumuamua was the first known interstellar object to visit our solar system, and made headlines around the world in 2017.
When it flew past our sun, the world marvelled over its elongated, cigar-shaped body which some scientists initially suggested might be an alien probe.
But now a new theory may explain what it really is: astronomers at Yale and the University of Chicago say it’s a hydrogen iceberg.
What’s more, there might be many more of them out there, forming in the dense cores of molecular clouds throughout our Milky Way galaxy, the researchers suggest.
A study based on the researchers’ findings has been accepted by the Astrophysical Journal Letters and appears on the preprint website arXiv.
The researchers believe that the idea that it’s a block of hydrogen ice could explain many of the weird properties that led scientists to label it a possible alien spacecraft.
Leave a Reply