“I think the sense of excitement stems in part from the timing of these discoveries,” Dr. Laughlin said. That discovery occurred in 1995, shortly before the Spitzer Space Telescope, which was built without exoplanets in mind, was launched. Astronomers have long suspected that if anything came calling from another star system, it would be comets. Now, with telescopes like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and the Pan-STARRS in Hawaii, which discovered Oumuamua, they do. Thus far, the two examples of interstellar comets that humans have observed could not be more different.

Source: New York Times December 07, 2019 09:56 UTC