Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2018

JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2018 But this designa- tion was al- so destined to last only a short time, because as soon as the astronomers confirmed the extrasolar ori- gin of the object, the MPC decided to introduce a new class, the I class (for interstellar), and the provisional name of the object became I/2017 U1. Finally, with unprecedented speed, the MPC and the Working Group on Small Body Nomenclature of the International Astronomical Union decided to assign a defini- tive name to the object, Oumuamua − full name: 1I/`Oumuamua, pronounced ‘oh-moo-ah-moo-ah’ and meaning ‘a messenger from afar arriving first’ in Hawaiian. In the first two weeks after the discovery, at least a dozen teams of researchers participated in the dynamic, photometric and spectroscopic study of