It\u2019s a stellar discovery. <\/p>\n
A Manhattan-sized interstellar comet was spotted blazing through our solar system \u2014 marking only the third time a mysterious object from beyond our cosmic neighborhood has been observed.<\/p>\n
The fast-moving comet \u2014 named 3I\/ATLAS \u2014 was first discovered Tuesday by NASA\u2019s ATLAS telescope in Chile, sparking a race among astronomers to gather data as they traced its path back to June 14, the space agency announced Wednesday<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThese things take millions of years to go from one stellar neighborhood to another, so this thing has likely been traveling through space for hundreds of millions of years, even billions of years,\u201d Paul Chodas, director of NASA\u2019s Center for Near Earth Object Studies, said Thursday.<\/p>\n Artist\u2019s concept of interstellar object 3I\/Atlas. NASA \/ SWNS<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t know, and so we can\u2019t predict which star it came from.\u201d<\/p>\n The icy celestial visitor, believed to have come from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, is expected to pass 150 million miles away from Earth in October and poses no threat, NASA said.<\/p>\n It is currently 416 million miles from the sun, near Jupiter, and hurtling through space at a scorching 37 miles per second, with early reports showing the comet sporting a glowing tail and surrounding cloud of gas and dust around its nucleus. <\/p>\n Its origin remains unknown. <\/p>\n Image of interstellar object 3I\/Atlas. K Ly\/Deep Random Survey \/ SWNS<\/p>\n Illustration of interstellar object 3I\/Atlas. ESA\/Hubble\/NASA\/ESO\/M.Kornmesser \/ SWNS<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve been expecting to see interstellar objects for decades, frankly, and finally we\u2019re seeing them,\u201d Chodas added, noting its size appears to span about 12 miles across \u2014 making it larger than the first two known spacefaring drifters.<\/p>\n \u201cA visitor from another solar system, even though it\u2019s natural \u2014 it\u2019s not artificial, don\u2019t get excited because some people do \u2026 It\u2019s just very exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n The first interstellar object identified from Earth was Oumuamua<\/a>, named after the Hawaiian observatory that found it in 2017. The second, known as 21\/Borisov<\/a>, was detected in 2019.<\/p>\n The latest cosmic nomad will remain visible by telescope through September before it nears the sun. <\/p>\n It is expected to reappear on the other side of the sun in early December. <\/p>\n With Post wires<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s a stellar discovery. A Manhattan-sized interstellar comet was spotted blazing through our solar system \u2014 marking only…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":37653,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[4514,15875,2846,30517,916,159,783,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-37652","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-astronomy","9":"tag-comets","10":"tag-discovery","11":"tag-interstellar","12":"tag-nasa","13":"tag-science","14":"tag-space","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114794147174198702","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37652\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}