Mysterious Manhattan-sized interstellar comet spotted blasting through solar system: NASA
A Manhattan-sized interstellar comet was spotted blazing through our solar system — marking only the third time a mysterious object from beyond our cosmic neighborhood has been observed.
The fast-moving comet — named 3I/ATLAS — was first discovered Tuesday by NASA's ATLAS telescope in Chile, sparking a race among astronomers to gather data as they traced its path back to June 14, the space agency announced Wednesday.
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'These things take millions of years to go from one stellar neighborhood to another, so this thing has likely been traveling through space for hundreds of millions of years, even billions of years,' Paul Chodas, director of NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies, said Thursday.
3 Artist's concept of interstellar object 3I/Atlas.
NASA / SWNS
'We don't know, and so we can't predict which star it came from.'
The icy celestial visitor, believed to have come from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, is expected to pass 150 million miles away from Earth in October and poses no threat, NASA said.
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It is currently 416 million miles from the sun, near Jupiter, and hurtling through space at a scorching 37 miles per second, with early reports showing the comet sporting a glowing tail and surrounding cloud of gas and dust around its nucleus.
Its origin remains unknown.
3 Image of interstellar object 3I/Atlas.
K Ly/Deep Random Survey / SWNS
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3 Illustration of interstellar object 3I/Atlas.
ESA/Hubble/NASA/ESO/M.Kornmesser / SWNS
'We've been expecting to see interstellar objects for decades, frankly, and finally we're seeing them,' Chodas added, noting its size appears to span about 12 miles across — making it larger than the first two known spacefaring drifters.
'A visitor from another solar system, even though it's natural — it's not artificial, don't get excited because some people do … It's just very exciting.'
The first interstellar object identified from Earth was Oumuamua, named after the Hawaiian observatory that found it in 2017. The second, known as 21/Borisov, was detected in 2019.
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The latest cosmic nomad will remain visible by telescope through September before it nears the sun.
It is expected to reappear on the other side of the sun in early December.
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