A team of astronomers has admitted that the interstellar object that passed through our solar system in 2017 has been incorrectly pronounced at every single conference, TED talk and Radio 4 appearance since its discovery. The object’s actual nature remains, in technical terms, anyone’s guess.
The Hawaiian name ‘Oumuamua, meaning ‘scout’ or possibly ‘messenger’, has been rendered as everything from “oh-moo-ah-moo-ah” to “oom-wow-oom-wow” by scientists who spent six years studying astrophysics but zero hours learning to pronounce words with glottal stops.
“We’ve been saying it wrong this entire time,” confirmed Dr Rachel Pemberton, senior researcher at the Institute for Objects We Saw Once and Then Lost. “Every documentary. Every peer-reviewed paper presentation. Every time we corrected our relatives at Christmas dinner, we were also wrong.”
The correct pronunciation apparently features an ‘okina, a glottal stop that functions as a consonant in Hawaiian. Most astronomers have been confidently omitting it while explaining dark matter to anyone who’ll listen.
“The trick is to say it with absolute authority,” said Professor James Wickham, who has delivered forty-seven lectures on the subject. “I’ve been saying ‘oh-MOO-ah-MOO-ah’ with tremendous confidence since 2017. Turns out it should be more of an ‘oh-MOO-wah-MOO-wah’ with a pause that I’ve never once included.”
Wickham added that he’s “not about to start now.”
The pronunciation revelation comes alongside renewed acknowledgment that scientists remain divided on what ‘Oumuamua actually was. Current theories include: a comet, an asteroid, a chunk of solid hydrogen, an alien spacecraft, or a piece of cosmic debris that looked weird because telescopes caught it at a funny angle.
“We observed it for about three weeks before it buggered off into deep space,” Pemberton explained. “So we’re working with roughly the same amount of information you’d get from a fleeting Tinder match. Then we’ve spent seven years writing papers about it.”
The object’s unusual elongated shape and unexpected acceleration prompted speculation about extraterrestrial technology. This was either serious scientific inquiry or astronomers getting a bit carried away, depending on which astronomer you ask and whether they’ve had wine.
A 2018 paper suggested ‘Oumuamua could be an alien light sail. A 2021 paper suggested it was nitrogen ice from a Pluto-like planet. A 2023 paper suggested everyone calm down, it was probably just a comet. All papers pronounced the name differently in their audio abstracts.
“The beautiful thing about astronomy is that we can make authoritative statements about objects millions of miles away that we saw briefly through a telescope,” said Wickham. “The less beautiful thing is admitting we can’t properly say their names and aren’t entirely sure what we looked at.”
The team has now listened to a pronunciation guide recorded by a native Hawaiian speaker. They estimate they’ll revert to their original mispronunciation within a fortnight.
‘Oumuamua has not returned for comment. It is currently somewhere beyond Neptune, blissfully unaware of any of this.
