A fresh image from the Hubble Space Telescope has revealed comet 3I/ATLAS flying past our solar system at incredible speed — www.naijnaira.com reports.
CNN reported that Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 captured the comet on July 21 while it was still 277 million miles from Earth.
The comet was first spotted on July 1, moving at an astonishing 130,000 miles per hour, making it the fastest interstellar object ever tracked in our system.
Its teardrop-shaped dust trail is clearly visible in the Hubble image, formed as heat from the sun forces gas and particles away from its icy nucleus.
Astronomers estimate the nucleus could measure anywhere from 1,000 feet to 3.5 miles wide, though it remains too small to view directly.
Alongside Hubble, other observatories like James Webb and the W.M. Keck facility in Hawaii are studying the comet’s chemistry and structure.
Scientists say 3I/ATLAS will remain visible through September before vanishing behind the sun, only to reappear in December.
“This object is like a bullet glimpsed for a fraction of a second,” said UCLA astronomer David Jewitt. “Its origin remains a complete mystery.”
The comet is only the third interstellar visitor ever recorded, after ‘Oumuamua in 2017 and Borisov in 2019.
Researchers believe it has been traveling through space for billions of years, gaining speed as it slingshot past stars and stellar nurseries.
Oxford physicist Matthew Hopkins, who studied its velocity, explained: “This speed gives us valuable clues about its possible age and makeup.”
Hopkins and colleagues suggest the comet could be more than 7.6 billion years old, making it older than our sun and planetary system.
Interstellar objects cross our skies more often than we realize, but most are too small to detect unless they pass extremely close to Earth.
The upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory, with its massive 28-foot mirror, could change that by scanning the sky every three nights.
Experts predict Rubin might identify up to 50 new interstellar objects within the next decade, opening a new window into these cosmic travelers.
Jewitt added, “This is the beginning of a new era of sky surveys. We’re finally able to spot visitors we couldn’t see before.”
Article updated 2 months ago. Content is written and modified by multiple authors.
