Remember, the object is tumbling. Its hard to visualize how a rotating object could erode into that shape if the axis of rotation was not perfectly aligned with the direction of travel. And its not really going fast enough for the interstellar medium to abrade its surface. The moon gets the same treatment and its still spherical. I still think they've got the shape of this thing all wrong, although I can't suggest a reason why.

It's tempting to fantasize this object as some sort of ETI interstellar probe, but the facts just don't add up. Its velocity relative to the Local Standard of Rest suggests it is just drifting along in the stream of stars just like we are. Any interstellar vehicle would be moving along at a speed of at least several hundreds of km/sec, not several tens of km/sec. And an ETI that couldn't work up at least a few thousand km/sec would not be very technologically interesting. At its current slow speed, it would not require a needle configuration to slip easily through the interstellar medium.

No, except for its odd shape, (which may turn out to be some misinterpretation of data after all) this thing is pretty much what we would expect for some ordinary rock or iceball. Now that we have the tech to spot these guys, I expect we're going to be seeing a whole lot more of them.