CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – NASA has discovered an interstellar comet that’s wandered into our backyard. The space agency spotted the quick-moving object with the Atlas telescope in Chile earlier this week, and confirmed it was a comet from another star system.
New interstellar comet will keep a safe distance from Earth, NASA says
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – NASA has discovered an interstellar comet that’s wandered into our backyard.
The space agency spotted the quick-moving object with the Atlas telescope in Chile earlier this week, and confirmed it was a comet from another star system.
It’s officially the third known interstellar object to pass through our solar system and poses no threat to Earth.
“These things take millions of years to go from one stellar neighborhood to another, so this thing has likely been traveling through space for hundreds of millions of years, even billions of years,” Paul Chodas, director of NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies, said Thursday. “We don’t know, and so we can’t predict which star it came from.”