Discoveries using the telescopes on Mauna Kea

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

that would strongly suggest it's a comet rather than an asteroid.

Yes, that seems the likeliest explanation at the moment. It would differ from local comets in at least one respect, as it didn’t have a recognizable tail, but that could be due to a number of factors encountered in interstellar space. It’s a unique object whatever it is, and It’s discovery has astronomers watching for others like it visiting our solar system, with the possibility that there’s one passing through at any given time.

At the link I posted previously there’s an animation showing Oumuamua’s trajectory entering and leaving our system. Quite a slingshot effect.

I alternate between thinking of the planet as home — dear and familiar stone hearth and garden — and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners. Today I favor the latter view. The word “sojourner”... invokes a nomadic people’s sense of vagrancy, a praying people’s knowledge of estrangement, a thinking people’s intuition of sharp loss: “For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding.” - Annie Dillard