What Is 'Oumuamua? With Dr. Karen Meech

expect the unexpected that old adage well describes the story of the first detected to interstellar object ever discovered in our solar system these kinds of objects were expected there was simply no reason for the galaxy not to be full of objects ejected from other star systems we just hadn't seen one yet and there is no real way to predict when one might pass through but now enter Momoa the first object we've ever seen that because of its trajectory must be from somewhere else in the Milky Way as mysterious as an object from another star system might seen mumumu has exceeded all expectations as to its weirdness not only is it from somewhere else it's also among the strangest objects we've ever seen in our solar system not merely just a lump of rock and ice as most comets and asteroids from our own star system tend to be but a very strangely shaped object currently thought to be like a pancake that speculation regarding its origins has moved into a territory including that may have once been part of a planet shattered in a cataclysmic supernova or even that it has an alien origin such as a probe that can't be discounted though it remains very unlikely but a Mumma is merely the first such object we've detected there will undoubtedly be more so how do we learn about these objects how did scientists determine the color size and shape of the first interstellar object that's the job of my guest one of the researchers looking into a memo with her team at the pan-starrs one telescope in Hawaii just exactly what is our first messenger from afar as a Momo translates to where did it come from how'd it get here and where is it going next you have fallen into event horizon with John Michael Gautier [Music] [Music] [Music] dr. Meads leads the astrobiology research team at the University of Hawaii and specializes in planetary astronomy in particular with the study of distant comets and their relation to the early solar system dr. Mead recently led the characterization of the first interstellar object or murmur which was discovered by the pan-starrs Observatory telescope dr. Mitch welcome to the program hi thank you now dr. Mitch the strange object that passed through the solar system muah-muah is the first time we've ever detected an object that is interstellar in nature it comes from somewhere else how did you guys discover that how did you spot it well it was through the course of the normal near-earth object survey that's conducted by the pan-starrs telescope in Hawaii and the team had gotten the data in as usual and then on October 19th they noticed an object that was moving very rapidly with respect to the Stars which is typical of a near-earth object and so they looked in the previous day's data and found it there but it wasn't picked up automatically because there were only a couple of images and so immediate follow-up from various stations suggested that it might have an interesting orbit but that was immediately discarded as probably having errors that were too big but by the 22nd of October our team follows up these things with the Canada France Hawaii telescope that's when the head of the NAO Survey Richard wainscot called me at home and said I think we have an object that's interstellar and that's when we got excited and put the whole machinery into motion to get telescope time now with how how visible was it because I I know it was seen after it passed earth as this at the threshold of what we can detect as far as objects that pass by earth nearby no it was not terribly faint at the time of discovery but anything on an orbit like this the passes very close to the Sun effectively a long-period type orbit doesn't stay in the vicinity of the Sun very long so it was moving really fast and because these things shine by the reflected light from their surface that means their brightness drops very quickly so when it was first seen it was at its brightest and easily detectable with even small telescopes but then it dropped in brightness very rapidly so the professional astronomers had maybe 10 days where it was relatively easy to do the science and then our very last observations were January 2nd but that required a lot of orbits with Hubble Space Telescope now it varied in brightness right as well which initially led people to think that it maybe was an elongated object that was tumbling or doing something like that in order to create changes of brightness what's the current thinking on that well the light curve which is what how we describe the brightness variations over time at first seemed to be varying by about seven point three hours but what was and that's not unusual everything rotates and everything in the solar system has a light curve but what was unusual was the range in brightness variation which was a factor of 10 and there's very few asteroids in our solar system that have brightness variations as big as that and so that led us to speculate that it was possibly as elongated as a ratio of 10 to 1 how's more and more teams started to get data they were reporting different periods of variation which didn't seem compatible with ours and when you put it all together it turns out that it's in what we call an excited rotation state it's not really tumbling because that's sort of a chaotic process but excited means that it's rotating if you imagine a pencil it's rotating around the short axis as you would suspect but it's also rolling around the long axis and that long axis is nodding up and down and many comets exhibit this type of behavior and we speculated that this object could have this excited rotation is a consequence of its ejection from its home solar system now how do you differentiate that from something like if it's an albedo difference say it has a dark side versus a light side you know like some some of the moons in the solar system have how do you tell the difference between that and something that's you know spinning that's relatively easy by the shape of the light curve a warm was light curve the shape was very rounded and broad on the top with a deep narrow V at the bottom and that's always a signature of a shape light curve typically something that's elongated or in a couple of pieces whereas something that would have just a bright side and a dark side for example Saturn's moon I a patisserie aliy bright on one side really dark on the other and that light curve looks more symmetrical like a sine wave and so it's from the shape of the light curve that you can tell the difference so this object presumably originated in a star system far away that was maybe a protoplanetary disc or early in its you know life is the it's that excited rotation is that from that star system I mean did that actually set this thing off moving or or is it something that happens in the interstellar medium I suspect it was something that happened as it left its solar system things that you know during the birth process of a young star system there will be a lot of collisions and that could certainly give it an excited rotation state many of the the small bodies in our solar system that have excited rotation states namely comets get this excited state because they have uneven outgassing you know the the ices the gas don't come off the surface uniformly it comes out like little rocket thrusters and that can give it an excited state but we think in the case of omoi that it probably achieved it from its home solar system and not from the interstellar medium there wouldn't be anything that would excite it in deep space so what about an origin for it I mean it has a strange shape what what exactly is there any good hypothesis of you know is this a piece of a planet is this you know what is this as far as what we know what what can you infer that this might be well personally I think one of the most intriguing things that still needs an explanation is it's strange shape and I should mention that how we get the shape from the light curve depends completely on how it's rotating so the description of a ten-to-one axis ratio is fine if it's in a simple state of rotation there's also phase effects like how much of the object side is illuminated for example 1/2 1/2 of a moon you wouldn't give an access ratio of that one of 1 to 1 you'd say it's 1 to 2 we didn't take account of the phase effect so it could be a little less elongated but also the direction at which the rotation axis has pointed will give you a difference in the shape and that could make it longer now that being said in an excited state Mike Pelton and his colleagues had pointed out that the shape could actually be more of a flattened oval rather than a cigar shape so we've got a variety of shapes and then a lot of teams have tried very diligently to figure out what could cause this one researcher Sean Raymond thought it could be titled disruption during the formation of a young solar system for example if you remember when shoemaker-levy 9 passed close enough to Jupiter it got tidally disrupted and completely torn apart Sean suggested maybe this happened to Omaha it got stretched others talked about maybe this was a fragment during the death throes of a solar star namely supernovae could have shredded planetary material there were some other exotic ideas maybe a disruption in a white dwarf system or a binary star system or maybe during the phase when a star evolves and gets bigger and bigger and bigger at the end of its lifetime that I've melted some material and created this shape and then another interesting one considers that maybe it had a normal more normal shape but as it was passing through the interstellar medium abrasion from dust effectively whittled it down into this narrow needle-like shape so there's a variety of ideas and I think what's been very interesting with Omaha is the rich set of ideas that are coming out of it but I think the shape is one thing that we are not going to know how it came about maybe with the next one we'll see now if that's an interesting idea an interesting concept a planet that's been shredded by a supernova and a piece of it flies by us what would that do to an object I mean would it other than changing its shape but what would it do I mean could you go and study supernovas from this object well ideally I would have loved to have gotten information on more information on the chemistry on isotopes because isotopes are really good tracers of the history of an object but isotopes require very bright objects or a lot of gas or being up close and personal with the object and so that sort of information there was no chance of getting with something that was only visible for effectively a little over a week so you know supernova I don't know what it would do you certainly have a lot of perhaps radioactive material but I'm not convinced that a piece of a planet would survive that process I I really don't know it was an intriguing idea now one thing that does seem to be known is that a Mumma is red in color now I've seen it said that that's probably something related to being in the interstellar medium for a very long time can you explain that well redness has several origins one could be that it's just made of organics and that's typically why comets are reddish and when we say red it doesn't mean it will look read it just means it reflects the redder light more efficiently than the blue light so one cause could be organics another cause could be certain types of minerals iron rich minerals can make it reddish such as Mars or some of the outer solar system satellites but also there's a process called space weathering and that's where very high-energy particles that fly through our solar system and would be out in the interstellar medium and these are called cosmic rays they hit the surface materials and that will break the molecular bonds and things like hydrogen can get driven off so things tend to get darker over time and they tend to get redder for a period and then really really dark so that's what you'd expect on surfaces that have sat out in space with no alteration for millions to billions of years so that would maybe suggest that it's a very primitive object right well you know asteroids tend to get reddened in our solar system they've they're primitive on the scale of what's in our solar system but they're not the most primitive so it could suggest this yes but if it suggests organics then you have the building blocks of life in such an object or at least so is thought from the Comets that we have in the solar system correct correct so that makes it even more interesting because you know I mean could the organics that that from which life arises have originated on an interstellar asteroid or comet now this object accelerated which is probably a bad word for it it just probably didn't slow down enough but it's that they're saying it accelerated after it passed the Sun is that because you know no op casting was seen which would indicate a comet is that because of is that simply because of outgassing you know it had a piece of ice you know thatthat sublimed and just you know vaporized and sent it on it's you know a little bit faster trajectory or is that unsatisfying you know is there something else what what would what is the best hypothesis to explain that that acceleration well we had you know in the paper that we published this summer led by Marco Miceli we had a variety of possible mechanisms that could cause the observed acceleration and nobody finds any problem with the acceleration itself it's a 50 sigma result it's falling off as one over the distance squared directed radially away from the Sun and that's a very common thing that is seen with comets and the reason that they accelerate is because they have uneven outgassing which appears in the form of jets and so it acts like a little rocket thruster and as you mentioned no team saw any gas or dust however we feel that this is the most likely explanation for the acceleration but let me mention some of the others one was radiation pressure this would fit if it had a ridiculously low density has something like aerogel something ten thousand times less than cometary materials or if it was a thin shell of material but both of those are unreasonable physical explanations so we rejected that and then there's about five or six other possibilities which we examined that could cause accelerations but many of these were thrown out either because the acceleration amount was wrong completely wrong or in the wrong direction so the thing that we were left with was the comet outgassing so the big puzzle is how do you explain comet outgassing when you didn't see comet outgassing well first of all was the lack of dust if there's gas coming off of the object it should be pushing a small dust and so we had some very strong limits on the amount of small dust near or more to - less than a kilogram which is hardly anything on the other hand there have been papers published that say if an object is traveling through interstellar space and it passes through a molecular cloud that would preferentially remove all of the small dust so if a more and more doesn't have small dust but it only has big dust it would take a lot of gas to get that off and we just didn't have the sensitivity and a good example to think of is the asteroid ryugu from the Hayabusa to Mission when you look at that surface there's really effectively no small dust anywhere there's different physical reasons for that but the lack of dust doesn't bother us now secondly the lack of gas the amount of gas that we felt was needed to push a mwah mwah in order to give it this acceleration was sufficient such that if it had exactly the same chemistry as comets in our solar system one of the teams that got a spectrum and was looking for the cyanide molecule should have seen it and they didn't but it's coming from another solar system and there's no expectation that the chemistry should be the same everywhere so we think outgassing is absolutely the the right explanation that's interesting that you you mentioned the chemistry that the chemistry of this object could be very different because it's from another part of the galaxy essentially what do you expect to see with that is there any is there any hypothesis of what what variation there could be in chemistry between our solar system versus another solar system what's what see is there anything there that you can kind of infer well we're really still at the infancy of exploring the chemistry and other solar systems obviously everything in the universe starts with the same basic ingredients but how it comes together in a young what we call protoplanetary disk this is the disk shaped pattern of gas and dust as the planets are forming and the stars forming in the center there's a lot of chemistry that's going on in that disk and with the Alma telescope in Chile they're starting to resolve the structure in these discs and they're they're varied and they're wonderfully different and they can see dust lanes and gaps where planets may be forming and depending on the mass and the temperature profiles in these discs you would expect a difference in the chemical structure within the disk it doesn't mean that they'll be really bizarre compounds that we've never seen it just means the proportions of what we see in our solar system may be distributed quite differently and so I think this is exciting you know we've had a sample of something from another star system that we could study briefly and it hopefully will give us clues as to the building processes for other planets now is there is there any good indication of where this thing originated from I mean do you have I know there's some candidates but can you tell where this thing originally came from no we knew it came from the direction of the constellation Lyra and of course right after the discovery people were excited thinking oh there's a young protoplanetary disc in the that system but you have to remember that everything is moving in space so at the point at which a moremore would have been there it wouldn't have been there so to really do the problem accurately to trace back where it came from first of all having the non gravitational or this acceleration was essential because if you didn't account for that you're tracing back the path in the wrong direction but secondly you need to precisely know the positions of all of the stars that it might have passed and the directions that they're moving and so the European Gaia experiment it's a space satellite has been making very precise position measurements over the years and they just did a big big data release this spring and it was hoped that that would give us precise enough stellar positions that we could trace backwards so Koren Baylor Jones and his team actually found four candidates that were possible meaning that omoi passed within an ort cloud or two of the home star which is the the vast cloud of comets that we have surrounding our solar system and that was a plausible scenario but the problem was it went past them too quickly and it would be really hard to eject no more more from something that fast now he couldn't go very far back in time because the accuracy of this space catalog isn't yet good enough maybe in a few years once there's more data releases we can do the experiment again so for now we cannot tell where it came from exactly there's a few candidates and they'll be more in the future but that's the best we can do with this one wasn't Vica initially a candidate very initially because that's in the same constellation but no not not anymore but that does that there is a dust disk around that star as I remember yes but just because it's apparently coming from that direction in the sky doesn't quite work sort of like a billiards game yeah really reconstruct yeah all right on that note we need to take a break I am joined today by dr. Karen Meech and we are talking about the very first detected interstellar object passing through our solar system [Music] be sure to LIKE subscribe and share the video if you'd like to support event horizon you'll be pleased to know we've recently launched a patreon link in the description below or alternatively you can use your cellular telephone to scan the assemblage of squares on screen now and we're back with dr. Karen Meech talking about Roma dr. Meech the the geometry of this object at the pancake shape that that seems to be the favored explanation for what it is now typically like a comet they have as we've seen with with comets in our solar system they're very loosely packed you know asteroids and comets are very loosely packed because there's not a lot of gravity there so it's that geometry I mean could you can you easily have that with it being a loosely packed object or does it need to be thanked something like a piece of an iron core iron nickel core from you know an asteroid or shredded planet or something like that can you actually have that with what this object and what about size how big is a moma well first of all in the shape while B I wouldn't say pancake we don't actually know that the thickness of the flattened oval I wouldn't say that it's the favored shape for example you know it's a possible shape with this excited motion but you can still also have the long cigar like shape with the excited motion so first of all there's no favored right yet it's possible that with further analysis of the data some of the teams that have the expertise to do this could pull out a better shape but for right now I'd say it's either one now secondly whether or not you need it to have any strength or large density the answer is no Andrew McNeil early on right after it was discovered worked on estimating the the strength that would have to have to have this really elongated shape which would actually be the weakest shape and he said if it were a strengthless object it would have to have typical asteroid like densities in order to hold itself together you know so something on the or of rocks that you would see around on the other hand if you give it a little bit of strength and there's nothing in space that strengthless it wouldn't take much and in fact the amount of strength it would take was absolutely comparable to comets that we see and the the strength that they have surprisingly is about the same strength as freshly fallen snow and we can still see that comets hold themselves together just fine even when they're spinning so I don't think there's anything extraordinary needed to explain Oh mwah mwah so it's a relatively small object not a lot of gravity and I can't just pull itself into a sphere or anything like that it's far too small for that right right oh I forgot to answer the size question it's very difficult to answer the size question because the measurement that we had was the brightness and the brightness will depend on the surface area that's reflecting the light as well as the reflectivity or albedo what we had done was we had assumed it was a low albedo much like comets and comets reflect about 4% of the light that hits their surface and it's also a good assumption for anything that sat around in space for a long time because again the space weathering drives the breaks bonds drives away hydrogen and that leaves a lot of carbon on the surface which effectively is graphite and it's very dark so we thought that was a fairly safe assumption so on that assumption with the ten to one axis ratio we said it's about 800 meters by eighty meters now on the other hand the spitzer space telescope did some observations for 30 hours in november and they did not detect a more more but what they were trying to detect was the heat signature from it so they now have an upper limit of the radiated heat which is directly related to size so now they're suggesting that the size is actually quite a bit smaller because it must be a bit brighter than we thought but everything is holding together in a consistent way so it's so it's absorbing heat from the Sun and reradiating it and infrared right so it and you can kind of in deduce from that that the object is probably pretty small any ballpark you know well this one unfortunately is model dependent and so they they have three numbers they said it could be 50 meter radius or 70 or 220 which is more closer to our end depending on what the thermal properties of the surface are and so they made some assumptions whether it was asteroid like or comment like and so again as with science unfortunately we have to take account of errors and a lot of unknown properties now I would be remiss because a Momo was in the news last week so heavily that it can't be ruled out that maybe there is an artificial origin as unlikely as that is for this object would you like to address that it could it be or is that outright not possible well you know in science it's very hard to say it's outright not possible but I think extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and in the paper that came out last week you know there they effectively are suggesting that solar radiation pressure is a better explanation for the acceleration seen as opposed to cometary outgassing and they calculated the same mass to area ratio that we had already published in June but they went further and made the step you know they also talked about the strength which reproduced much of the work that was done before but then they came at the end to the conclusion that therefore this must be a thin sheet of material namely a solar sail well first of all you really do have to have extraordinary evidence if you're going to make that claim and secondly if you can imagine it a solar shell a solar sail is very much shaped like a thin sheet of paper and the thin sheet of paper would not have given the rotational light curve that we saw because if you imagine the thin sheet of paper when it's faced onto you be reflecting a lot of light and then when it's edge on there will be virtually no light and that's vastly different from the ten to one light curve that we saw so you know all of the scientists I've talked to say there's absolutely no way to reproduce the light curve with a solar sail you know it's it's nice to be speculative and I'm sure all the astronomers would be excited to detect evidence of alien civilization but I'm pretty sure that this is not it so you could say that because of the detected variations in light it wouldn't make a very good solar sail if it was tumbling am i right in that well it wouldn't make a good solar sail if it's tumbling no but I think fundamentally you couldn't get the same shape of light curve from a solar sail all right now I wanted to ask you about pan-starrs itself now this is a telescope in Hawaii and looking for near-earth objects right can you tell us something about pan-starrs well pan-starrs is a survey telescope there's actually two of them now pan-starrs one and pan-starrs two both are surveying the sky and they're their mission right now is to search for near-earth asteroids that's supported by the nasa ennio program and so it's it scans the skies every night and I don't remember all of the statistics but I believe it covers the whole sky visible to Hawaii a handful of times per year at least and so every morning the data is examined its it's flagged for any objects that appear to be moving and then each morning a human actually looks at all of the images where there's flagged moving objects because ideally you'd like to see it in four images to make sure it really is a moving object because you can have all sorts of artifacts cosmic rays will create streaks of light that mimic moving things sometimes there's a gap between detectors that will interfere with the automated routines detecting things so in fact each morning they look at the objects personally and then those that are interesting get followed up with another telescope on Mauna Kea to try and get the orbits now we're also entering an era where we're going to have the LSST which is going to do all sky surveys what everyday and a half something along that that timeframe so we're gonna see a lot more objects like this you know it's a huge telescope and we're gonna see a lot more objects such as your earth objects which could be dangerous if something is detected an asteroid that could hit earth can we with our current technology be proactive and deflect it well that depends on a lot of things it depends on how soon before it gets to the earth that you discover it and if it's no warning at all and there's no chance you can do anything the hope for the near-earth objects that are in short period orbits is that you detect that it may have a future probability of hitting the earth and then people study it in detail to effectively decide whether or not it's any threat there's certainly a number of schemes that are suggested for mitigation strategies including trying to put some sort of thrust capability on the asteroid with a spacecraft either with a gravitational tractor such that a massive enough spacecraft is placed near it so that it deflects its orbit but again everything is contingent upon it being discovered early and so I think right now we're a bit in the infancy of looking at all the mitigation strategies and there's certainly other people that know a lot more about that than I do now with a Mumma again it's the the first interstellar origin object we've seen but it's always been sort of floating around there that this stuff probably passes through a lot this is just the first one that we saw do you expect us to see a lot of flotsam from you know the rest of the galaxy in the future well it's interesting LSST has predicted based on the current statistics that they will probably detect one per year ironically just before oma Moya was discovered a paper came out last fall by angle hearten jeddak II who had calculated the statistics of what the interstellar object density was based on the fact we had never seen one and so of course it's ironic that comes out at the time of the discovery of the first one but they had predicted that if there was cometary activity they had a somewhat low density but if there was no commentary activity the implication was that there would be one object of similar size inside the orbit of the earth at any one moment but of course things inside the orbit of the earth are harder to see because you'd have to be looking towards the Sun so in fact there may be a lot of stuff out there now speaking of things out there there's been talk over the last year or two about a potential planet 9 lurking in the outer solar system that's causing weird-looking orbits of objects do you think that's unlikely do you think that maybe we might find something but probably not or do you think it's maybe on better footing nowadays you know as people see these strange objects and calculate their orbit do you think there's anything to it well anytime you start to see clustering in orbits there's got to be an explanation for it so I think that's as valid an explanation as anything I don't think there's enough data yet to say definitively and in fact some people wondered could this hypothetical planet 9 or Planet X have perturbed something from our solar system one of our Oort cloud comets on to the path that or moremore has and that maybe it's just something from our solar system but that that was quickly thrown out because the supposed position in the sky of this planet 9 is completely in the wrong place to have produced something on Oh mom was orbit so it could be a now so say it see say you have another planet like a say are lost super earth you know it's some people say that you know this star system is a little bit weird because it doesn't have a super earth do you think it could be that or do you think maybe it's something that the Sun might have captured at some point from another star system I mean there's a lot of speculation going on what you know what the orange and the thing could be if it's there and also could pan-starrs pick it up I think pan-starrs would be capable of picking it up LSST would be better at it because it's a much bigger facility as far as capture versus formation in situating I think capture would be harder you know certainly is you you look at these spectacular images you see from Alma of the debris disks and the other solar systems that are forming you see that there the material that eventually formed the star system extends very far out and so we would have expected that we had a substantial disk so you know I would think it would be more likely that it was something that formed within our own solar system so the early days of the solar system were rather chaotic so it's certainly not implausible that something might have got tossed out early on until everything stabilized well certainly that's how the Oort cloud comets got there those were small things that formed within the vicinity of the giant planets that got kicked out into this vast cloud 100 to 150,000 au from the Sun right so they either hit a planet or got tossed what came in words and hit the Sun yeah yep all right dr. Mitch thank you for joining us today and I hope you'll come back and visit us if interesting new stuff about mo mo comes out you're most welcome just what was the mo was it a strange comet odd asteroid a planetary fragment ejected during the formation or the destruction of a star system we may never know as far as any potential alien origin for a Mumma is concerned I think it will probably be a new bow signal on that front it moves away from us further each day and while there are hypothetically possible ways to intercept the object it would also be very expensive and doesn't seem likely anytime so what of other interstellar visitors in our solar system right now there are at least two comets that have been captured by our solar system that are thought to maybe also have once been of interstellar origin those we can study at our leisure and more captured objects are probably waiting for us to discover as two objects passing through if they can be detected ahead of time they can also be intercepted and studied but that whom OMA itself turned out to be so strange even with the small glimpse we got of it says something it tells us that the universe itself is a very strange place and as one mystery about it gets solved by scientists another invariably arises to take its place [Music] should we not be announcing the competition winners today well there's been a slight issue with that I'm still waiting for the random comment selector to arrive random comment selector you know random number generators are my gyroscope abode what you mean wheelhouse well anyways you know me Anna I like analog I'll join not to take that personally we'll announce the winners when my analog randomizer arrives it's better not to be another hat John mmm hats and on that note be sure to tune in next week as we release Thanksgiving bonus content you've never heard before from our previous guests that's right sometimes to talk with them for quite a bit longer than an hour and speaking of the week after comes part two of my long-form discussion with none other than Isaac Arthur whom I could chat with for decades and still not cover everything see you then

Channel: Event Horizon

Views: 99,826

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Keywords: Oumuamua, 1i/2017 u1, interstellar, universe, space, comet, asteroid, alien, extraterrestrial, light sail, exoplanet, exocomet, fermi, paradox, karen meech, paper, John michael godier, godier, drake equation, alien spacecraft, artificial origin, near earth object, ufo, astrobiology, loeb, JPL, NASA, Spitzer, event horizon, event horizon john michael godier

Id: 8Q7TzLH2cRA

Length: 41min 2sec (2462 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 15 2018

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Show description. An interview with Dr. Karen Meech who leads the Astrobiology research team at the University of Hawaii which discovered the first interstellar object, named 'Oumuamua, by the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope. Dr. Meech's team recently led the characterization to determine the size, shape, color and light curve of this first interstellar visitor from afar – 'Oumuamua.