The bizarre cigar-shaped space rock is believed to have been wandering among the stars for hundreds of millions of years and it is the first foreign object in our solar system to be spotted.
The asteroid has been dubbed Oumuamua and is about 400 metres long and is a dark red colour.
It was spotted by the Pan-STARRS1 telescope in Hawaii on October 19, 2017, and travelling at about 95,000 kilometres per hour.
Scientists had originally thought that the asteroid originated from the star Vega, which is 25 light years away, but by analysing the trajectory of the rock, they have determined that Vega would have been no where near its current positing 300,000 years ago when Oumuamua’s journey started.
Now, however, scientists have concluded that the asteroid likely came from a binary star system – a solar system which has two stars that orbit each other.
This is because binary star systems are much more likely to eject objects from their systems due to the intense gravitational tug of war between two stars, according to the research published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Lead author Dr Alan Jackson, a postdoc at the Centre for Planetary Sciences at the University of Toronto Scarborough in Ontario, Canada, said: “It’s remarkable that we’ve now seen for the first time a physical object from outside our Solar System.
“It’s really odd that the first object we would see from outside our system would be an asteroid, because a comet would be a lot easier to spot and the Solar System ejects many more comets than asteroids.”
Scientists believe that interstellar objects enter our solar system about once a year, but they are difficult to spot because they are so faint.
Analysis of the rock suggests that it has a high metal content, but is lacking in water and ice.