Comet 3I/ATLAS has been observed by the Hubble Space Telescope, which delivered new insights into this third interstellar visitor. The orbital observatory has refined the estimates about the size of the cometary nucleus and confirmed that the comet is the fastest ever to come from beyond the Solar System. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

The comet was discovered on July 1 by the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), and it is the third interstellar object after ’Oumuamua , discovered in 2017, and Comet 2I/Borisov , discovered in 2019. From the get-go, Comet 3I/ATLAS looked different. It was twice as fast as the previous two, and it looked a lot bigger too.

In terms of speed, the comet

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