cigar-shaped

Sure, but "some conclusions" is a long way from "cigar-shaped".

By pure coincidence last time there was enough of this residue to mix with the cat barf and form a neat, dry, cigar-shaped... thing.

> The cigar-shaped object ... All they have is a light curve, right? No imaging, right? If so, "cigar-shaped" is just speculation.

Even considering simpler examples: So what if a probe is launched to catch our solar system's recent cigar-shaped visitor. Assume we catch it and want to bring back a sample of equal mass to the probe.

It should have been pancake-shaped or cigar-shaped to reduce the pressure differential from top to bottom, to something that the fabric could reasonably have withstood.

The discussion around the possibility of it being a spaceship rests on the idea that long thin cigar-shaped objects are the most efficient way to travel in space because it minimizes your need for ablative protection from interstellar dust/etc. But if you're tumbling end-over-end you've thrown that advantage away, so presumably that's not a thing you would intentionally do.

> 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. 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.