Cabo Cañaveral – The POT He has discovered an interstellar kite that has reached our backyard.
The space agency sighted the object of rapid movement with the ATLAS Celestial Exploration Telescope in Chile earlier this week, and confirmed that it was a kite from another star system. It is officially the third known interstellar object that passes through our solar system and does not represent any threat to Earth.
The most recent visitor is 670 million kilometers from the Sun, near Jupiter. NASA said the comet will make its closest approach to the Sun in October, sliding between the orbits of Mars and the Earth, but closer to the red planet than of us, at a safe distance of 240 million kilometers.
Astronomers around the world are monitoring the kite, an icy snowball officially designated as 3I/Atlas, to determine its size and shape. It should be visible with telescopes until September, before it approaches the sun too much, and will reappear in December on the other side of the sun.
The first interstellar visitor observed from the Earth was Oumuamua, which in Hawaiian means explorer, in honor of the Hawaii Observatory that discovered it in 2017. Classified at first as an asteroid, the elongated Oumuamua has since then shown signs of being a comet.
The second confirmed object that has been diverted from another star system to ours, 21/Borisov, was discovered in 2019 by an amateur astronomer of Crimea with that name. It is believed that it is also a kite.