The 'Oumuamua object: It's traveling through our solar system faster than any normal asteroid. Harvard Institute for Theory and Computation researchers suggest in a paper released on November 1, 2018 that the possibility of solar radiation pressure — the idea that photons from the sun might have pushed Oumuamua along — is the reason, but sneak in a far more creative idea at the end: “Alternatively, a more exotic scenario is that ‘Oumuamua may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization.”