This is an artist’s impression of ‘Oumuamua. Credit: ESO / M. Kornmesser

New research finds that ‘Oumuamua, the rocky object identified as the first confirmed interstellar asteroid, very likely came from a binary star system. “It’s remarkable that we’ve now seen for the first time a physical object from outside our Solar System,” says lead author Dr Alan Jackson, a postdoc at the Centre for Planetary Sciences at the University of Toronto Scarborough in Ontario, Canada. A binary star system, unlike our Sun, is one with two stars orbiting a common centre.

For the new study, published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Jackson and his co-authors set about testing how efficient binary star systems are at ejecting objects...

This is a composite which combines gas temperature (as the color) and shock mach number (as the brightness). Red indicates 10 million Kelvin gas at the centers of massive galaxy clusters, while bright structures show diffuse gas from the intergalactic medium shock heating at the boundary between cosmic voids and filaments. Credit: Illustris Team

A multi-institutional team gives the cosmology community a world-class simulation to study how the universe formed. Humans have long tried to explain how stars came to light up the night sky. The wide array of theories throughout history have one common (and correct) governing principle that astrophysicists still use to this day: by understanding the stars and their origins, we learn more about where we come from...