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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
Image reveals unprecedented view of the third interstellar object
observed passing through our solar system
By Ashley Strickland, CNN
Updated:
7:34 PM EDT, Thu August 7, 2025
Source: CNN
A new image has revealed the clearest glimpse yet of an interstellar
visitor zipping through our solar system.
The Hubble Telescope and its Wide Field Camera 3 got an incredible view
of the, which came from beyond our solar system, on July 21 when the
object was 277 million miles (445 million kilometers) from Earth.
In the image, a teardrop-shaped dust cocoon can be seen streaking from
the comet’s icy nucleus. A comet’s nucleus is its solid core, made
of ice, dust and rocks. When comets travel near stars such as the sun,
heat causes them to release gas and dust, which creates their signature
tails.
The venerable telescope is just one of many that are being used to
track the comet, first discovered on July 1, as it zooms at a
blistering 130,000 miles (209,000 kilometers) per hour. Its speed makes
3I/ATLAS the fastest object that originated outside of our solar system
to ever be observed traveling through it.
New observations, like those made with Hubble, are shedding more light
on the comet’s size. The small nucleus, which cannot be directly
seen, could be as large as 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometers) in diameter or as
small as 1,000 feet (305 meters) across, according to a accepted by The
Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Meanwhile, other space-based telescopes like the James Webb Space
Telescope, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the Neil
Gehrels Swift Observatory, along with ground-based observations from
the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, could reveal more about the
object’s chemical composition. The comet is expected to remain
visible to ground-based telescopes through September before passing too
close to the sun to be spotted until it reappears on the other side of
our star in early December.
But big questions about 3I/ATLAS remain, some of which may be
impossible to answer — including where exactly it came from.
“No one knows where the comet came from. It’s like glimpsing a
rifle bullet for a thousandth of a second. You can’t project that
back with any accuracy to figure out where it started on its path,”
said lead study author David Jewitt, professor of astronomy at the
University of California, Los Angeles, in a statement.
A speedy visitor
While the comet appears to behave like those that originated in our
solar system — as evidenced by that dust plume Hubble captured —
the speed of 3I/ATLAS is one indicator that it’s a visitor from
another solar system in our galaxy.
Scientists estimate it has been traveling through interstellar space
for billions of years. As objects travel through space, they experience
a gravitational slingshot effect from whizzing by stars and stellar
nurseries that increases their momentum. So the longer 3I/ATLAS has
spent in space, the faster it moves.
The comet is only the third known interstellar object to have been
observed in our solar system after in 2017 and in 2019.
“3I in particular is remarkable due to its velocity,” said Matthew
Hopkins, a recent doctoral student in the department of physics at the
University of Oxford who authored a separate study about the object.
“This velocity is very useful to us in particular as over the last
few years me and my coauthors have been building a model that allows us
to predict properties of (interstellar objects) such as their age and
composition, just from their velocity.”
For Hopkins, the discovery of 3I/ATLAS was incredibly fortuitous. The
find occurred just five days after he finished his doctoral work, which
involved a lot of time spent making predictions about future
interstellar object discoveries. In a few months, he’ll begin a
postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Canterbury in New
Zealand, where he’ll continue to research 3I/ATLAS.
During his doctoral studies, Hopkins and his collaborators in New
Zealand developed the Ōtautahi–Oxford model, a combination of data
from the Milky Way’s star population and models of how planetary
systems form that could help astronomers determine what interstellar
object populations should look like. Now, Hopkins is the lead author of
a separate about 3I/ATLAS.
Spotting interstellar objects in the future
It’s difficult to determine the age of interstellar objects, but
Hopkins and his colleagues believe 3I/ATLAS has about a 67% chance of
being more than 7.6 billion years old — while our sun, solar system
and its comets are only 4.5 billion years old, he said.
It’s pure chance that the interstellar comet crossed into our solar
system — but it’s not entirely rare, Hopkins said. We just don’t
see these visitors most of the time.
“(Interstellar objects) actually pass through the Solar System all
the time, especially the smaller ones which are more numerous: 80 the
size of ‘Oumuamua (about 656 feet, or 200 meters, across) pass
through the orbit of Jupiter every year, they’re just too small to
detect unless they get very close to the Earth,” Hopkins wrote in an
email.
However, astronomers are eager to have the Vera C. Rubin Observatory,
which this summer, scanning the skies for interstellar objects.With the
observatory’s massive primary mirror spanning 28 feet (8.4 meters)
across, it can spot small, faint and distant objects — and it’s
scanning the entire sky every three nights, allowing the telescope to
better catch sight of rapidly moving interstellar objects.
Hopkins’ coauthors estimate that Rubin could spy anywhere between
five and 50 interstellar objects over the next 10 years, and Hopkins is
optimistically leaning toward the latter. Discovering more interstellar
objects could help astronomers determine how varied or similar they
are, especially since the first three have been so different from one
another, Hopkins said.
“This latest interstellar tourist is one of a previously undetected
population of objects bursting onto the scene that will gradually
emerge,” Jewitt said. “This is now possible because we have
powerful sky survey capabilities that we didn’t have before. We’ve
crossed a threshold.”
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