Ancient interstellar object detected

3I/ATLAS could be the oldest comet ever seen

- Chris Lintott

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a mysterious interstellar interloper spotted passing through our Solar System. The comet, named 3I/ATLAS, was discovered by NASA's Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) survey telescope. Currently 675 million km (420 million miles) away, it could be the oldest comet ever seen.

“Rather than the quiet Wednesday I had planned, I woke up to messages like ‘3I!!!!!!!!!!’,” says Matthew Hopkins, one of the astronomers who discovered the comet. Hopkins and the team developed the Õtautahi-Oxford model to predict the properties of interstellar objects based on their orbits and possible origins.