Unexpected Guest

Had you laid down in a cool patch of grass on a warm evening in the summer of 2017 and stared up at the stars in wonder, the greatest explorer earth has ever seen would have passed right before your eyes. Relatively speaking, anyway. That year, a strange celestial body raced through our little corner of the solar system at an astonishing 59,000 miles per hour, pushed along by the force of its own ancient inertia. After rounding the sun, it closed to within 15 million miles of our planet on its journey to…somewhere.

By the time astronomers caught sight of our mysterious visitor it was observable only as a bright speck barely visible even with the mighty Hubble Space Telescope, having already left earth far behind, zooming off toward the constellation Pegasus. A comet, maybe an asteroid. Nobody knew for sure. But calculations told astronomers that whatever this explorer was, it came from far outside our own solar system. An astounding and historic discovery. It was