On September 6th 2017 astronomers at Hawaii’s PanStarr Observatory detected an object hurtling in from deep space, from the direction of Vega, a star 25 light-years away. The mystery object crossed the orbital plane of the solar system, within which the Earth and the other planets revolve around the sun where it was captured by our star’s gravitation. The elongated object accelerated to around 200,000 mph as it made its closest approach to the Sun on September 9th, launching the story and plot of Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb’s book,
Extraterrestrial, and the spell-binding saga of “Oumuamua” in which he attempts to make a case that the interstellar object passing through our solar system could have been a piece of alien technology.