Cigar from outer space

Perhaps you didn’t notice that we’ve had a recent interstellar visitor? But given that it was first observed from Hawaii, they finally assigned it the Hawaiian name “‘Oumuamua”, which means “scout”.. ‘Oumuamua is one strange celestial traveller. Milner plans to “survey one million nearby stars … and 100 nearby galaxies” in the “search for evidence of technological life in the Universe.” Naturally such a survey will generate vast amounts of data; Breakthrough Listen’s software is designed to search for patterns in the data that would suggest an artificial source. Isro’s latest Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle launch takes the idea of interstellar travel beyond conception to early execution, if only to show that it can become a reality someday On 13 December, Breakthrough Listen began observing ‘Oumuamua, looking for artificially produced radio signals. Pretty much a space cucumber.” Studying ‘Oumuamua for a paper they published in December, Fitzsimmons and his colleagues concluded that it probably has an inner core of ice, surrounded by an outer “carbon-rich mantle”.