Chris Lintott

The Vera Rubin Telescope will discover thousands of interstellar visitors. To tell a natural object from a relic of another civilization, scientists have developed a protocol: they’ll study the light 'fingerprints' of these guests.

The discovery of 1I/‘Oumuamua made us wonder: could some interstellar wanderers actually be our own comets, ejected from the Oort cloud and returning millions of years later? Simulations show that such ‘quasi-interstellar objects’ are indeed possible, but they have unique characteristics: extremely