Produced by the iLab at WBUR Boston.

Hey, hey, it's Amory.

We're taking a break from publishing full episodes for a few months while we work on

some special upcoming endless thread projects.

But don't worry, while we're working on a bunch of new episodes, we'll be keeping your

podcast feed nice and toasty warm with some updates on our favorite episodes.

Case in point, if you heard our most recent episode, the radio drama based on a sci-fi movie

script that was written by Redditors, you know it was a ridiculous story about aliens and

space and this mysterious interstellar object called Oumuamua.

There are a number of peculiarities about Oumuamua that captured the attention of Avi Loeb.

He's the chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University and he's a superstar

in his field.

Time magazine calls him one of the 25 most influential people in space.

He's published more than 600 papers dealing with various astrophysical and cosmological

findings and because he's at Harvard, practically in our backyard, we had to talk to him about

this interstellar object and my co-host Ben did.

But despite Avi's vast knowledge in the field, he couldn't explain some of the mysteries

surrounding Oumuamua.

For one, when it spun around over a period of eight hours, its brightness changed by a

factor of ten and that's much more than any object born in the solar system such as asteroids

or comets that change by its most a factor of three or so.

Another weirdness was that no one has detected any heat radiating from Oumuamua's surface,

...