There is an interstellar comet in our solar system, only the third known time it has happened.
Kenneth Chang writes for the New York Times:
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.
It is not yet known how big it is, but it will pass well clear of Earth. Its closest approach to Earth will occur in December, at a distance of 160 million miles.
[From an article in the New York Times. Diagram by NASA/JPL-Caltech]