> He and a colleague crunched the numbers and hypothesized that ‘Oumuamua was not actually cigar-shaped but possibly a disk less than a millimeter thick, with sail-like proportions that would account for its unusual acceleration as it moved away from the sun.<p>Just a q: I guess we didn't have the certainty about the object's shape that I assumed we did? It's pretty fascinating if we weren't even really certain that it was cigar-shaped, or at least if there was some wiggle room on the idea.<p>The other factors mentioned are also intriguing:<p>> It was at least “ten times more reflective than typical solar system [stony] asteroids or comets,” the author writes.<p>Huh. Fun to think about the possibilities. As for probabilities though, no idea there. After all, what we think is probable is basically anchored in our extremely short past as a tech-savvy human civilization, a temporal blip to say the least, on the chrono-spatiograph which is the wider universe.