A third visitor from another star is hurtling through the solar system
For only the third time in history, astronomers have detected a new interstellar visitor — an object from another star — blitzing into our solar system.
First named A11pl3Z and now designated as 3I/ATLAS , the comet was spotted by a survey telescope in Chile on July 1 and confirmed by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center the same day. To piece together its trajectory, astronomers dug through older sky surveys and found its position as early as mid-June. More