PASADENA, CA — Astronomers confirmed Tuesday that a fast-moving comet cutting through the inner solar system originated from somewhere outside it, making 3I/Atlas the third interstellar object ever detected and, according to its trajectory, the third to want absolutely nothing to do with us.
The object, first flagged by an automated sky-survey in northern Chile, is traveling at roughly 60 kilometers per second along a path so steeply unbound from the Sun’s gravity that researchers say it will exit the solar system and not be observable again for, conservatively, the rest of human civilization.
“It came from another star, it is passing through, and it is leaving,” said Dr. Aldo Berenger, a planetary astronomer with the Mount Wilson observing consortium. “We have had about a week to look at it. It does not appear interested in a longer engagement.”
Spectroscopic analysis suggests 3I/Atlas is a fairly ordinary comet — a chunk of frozen volatiles and dust likely shed from a planetary system several light-years away — though Berenger noted that “ordinary, in this case, means it was hurled across the galaxy for several billion years before arriving at exactly the moment we are this.”
Within hours of the announcement, social media users had begun proposing alternate names, lobbying the International Astronomical Union to formally designate the object “Cometn’t,” “the One That Got Away,” and, in one widely circulated post, “Honestly, Same.” A Change.org petition asking the IAU to rename it “First Smart Visitor” had gathered 41,000 signatures by Tuesday afternoon.
Climate researchers, meanwhile, noted that 3I/Atlas’s brief flyby coincides with the start of Atlantic hurricane season, an active heat dome over the Midwest, and the fourth consecutive week in which the planet’s surface temperature has exceeded what one modeling team described as the “we should probably stop making graphs about this” threshold. A NOAA spokesperson declined to draw any connection between the two phenomena, on the grounds that the comet has nothing to do with anything and “frankly seems to have the right idea.”
3I/Atlas will reach perihelion in late October before being slingshot back into interstellar space at a velocity that, researchers emphasize, will not be sufficient to bring it back. Berenger, asked whether any instrument could be deployed in time to gather more data, said the team was working on it but had begun to make peace with what he called “the dignity of its exit.”
The comet will remain visible to amateur astronomers with mid-range telescopes through August, after which it will dim, recede, and, as one Caltech graduate student put it, “become the only thing in recent memory to make a clean getaway.”