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COMETS AND ASTEROIDS
BBC Sky at Night Magazine
|January 2026
Track the rare interloper comet 3I/ATLAS
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Comet 3I/ATLAS is a rare interstellar visitor, a comet not gravitationally bound to any star, and only the third such object ever identified. When discovered by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) survey in Rio Hurtado, Chile, on 1 July 2025, it was 670 million km from the Sun, technically within the inner Solar System. Its closest approach to Earth, 270 million km or 1.8 AU, was on 19 December 2025. Pe
This story is from the January 2026 edition of BBC Sky at Night Magazine.
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