Third Interstellar Object, Comet 3I/ATLAS, Is Traveling Through Solar System

For only the third time, astronomers have found something passing through our solar system that came from outside the solar system.

This interstellar object, known as 3I/ATLAS, is still pretty far from the sun, currently located between the orbits of the asteroid belt and Jupiter but heading toward the inner solar system.

“This thing is traveling pretty fast” said Paul Chodas, director of the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

Relative to the sun, it is currently moving at about 130,000 miles per hour and it will continue to accelerate as the sun’s gravity pulls on it.

The first known interstellar object was Oumuamua, which traveled through the solar system in 2017. In 2019, Borisov, a comet of interstellar origin, passed by.

On Tuesday, a telescope in Chile spotted what initially looked like an unknown asteroid on a highly eccentric path that might come close to Earth’s orbit. The telescope is one of five around the world that are part of the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, or ATLAS, which is a NASA-funded project that watches for space rocks that might be on a collision course with our planet.