I want to call your attention to an assuming moving dot. Catalogued as 3I/ATLAS, this high speed dot is moving at more than the escape velocity of our Solar System as it comes crashing through on its journey through the Milky Way.
This dot is moving at a whopping 68 km/sec!
Folks, this is an interstellar object that originated from some other star system. The ATLAS telescope in Chile discovered it on July 1. Amateur astronomer Sam Deen and others were able to find pre-discovery images take by the ATLAS and the Zwicky Transient Facility. The pre-discovery images and new data combined to show that 3I/Atlas will reach about the same distance from the Sun as Mars next October and will then begin its journey back out the other side of the solar system. We’ll have our best view from Earth next Christmas, and if we’re lucky, this will be visible from larger backyard telescopes.
For now, it is a fuzzy dot, and a whole lot more data is needed. We know it is a few to a few tens of kilometers across, and that it has ices capable of melting as it moves toward the Sun. It’s also coming at us from a weird angle, so it likely originated from further out from the plane of the Milky Way, or its path has been bent at a weird angle while it interacted with some other solar system or a rogue object. To be honest … we don’t know a lot… but we know it came from somewhere, out there, beyond our solar system, and it’s bringing us a look at materials from other stars, and that is really enough of a reason to get excited.