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Q&A WITH AN INTERSTELLAR OBJECT INVESTIGATOR
BBC Sky at Night Magazine
|November 2025
A seven-billion-year-old object has just entered our Solar System. We ask what comet 3I/ATLAS is doing here - and what it reveals about our Galaxy's past
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What is 3I/ATLAS and what makes it so interesting?
3I/ATLAS is an interstellar object that was discovered passing through the Solar System by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) survey. During the survey, we built a simulation: the Õtautahi-Oxford interstellar object population model. Among other things, this can tell us about the age of transiting bodies like 3I/ATLAS. I noticed that 3I/ATLAS was bobbing up and down on its orbit around the Milky Way, which was a lightbulb moment for me, because I knew that older stars also followed a similar pattern in their orbits. When we ran all the statistics and looked at the correlations, we found that 3I/ATLAS was probably over seven billion years old, about twice the age of our Solar System.
Why have we only discovered three of these interstellar interlopers?
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der November 2025-Ausgabe von BBC Sky at Night Magazine.
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