An amateur astronomer looking through data from NASA's Perseverance rover may have spotted interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS as it passed overhead. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

3I/ATLAS was discovered on July 1, this year, moving through the Solar System at nearly twice the velocity of previous interstellar visitors ‘Oumuamua and Comet Borisov. The object was confirmed to be an interstellar comet and is suspected to be far larger than the previous two, with an estimated nucleus (the rocky part of the comet, excluding its coma) of around 5.6 kilometers (3.5 miles), and a possible "anomalous" mass of over 33 billion tons .

The astronomical community continued to track the object, known to be a comet due to outgassing

See Full Page