1uh In July, the Atlas W68 telescope, located in the Chilean desert, detected a rare object that was not intended for special observation. In four images taken with an exposure time of thirty seconds, a small group of pixels appears to be moving at astonishing speed. Using two other telescopes from the same network, funded by NASA to monitor asteroids crossing our planet’s orbit, the astronomers on duty that night calculated the object’s orbit and made an astonishing discovery: its trajectory was hyperbolic, it drew a curve that crossed the Solar System from side to side, crossing the orbit of Mars. This is an interstellar object that originates from outside the Solar System. The third ever discovered, after 1I/Oumuamua in 2017 and 2I/Borissov in 2019. A rare event observed by the scientific community using the best telescopes, both terrestrial and space.
As with 2I/Borissov, astronomers quickly identified the object as a comet, due to the release of gas around the nucleus, and the characteristic hairs of such objects that can be highlighted by telescopes in the opposite direction to the Sun. Interstellar comets, or “exocomets,” which move at speeds much higher than we can usually measure. In early July, when 3I/Atlas was still 4.5 times the Earth-Sun distance from our star, the comet was moving at a speed of 61 kilometers per second, or three to five times the speed of comets in the Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belt, two comet reservoirs in our Solar System. A characteristic that does not surprise astronomers too much, because the two previous interstellar objects, Oumuamua and Borissov, were already moving at high speeds, although lower.
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