spacedaily.com
The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, discovered on July 1, 2025, by a survey telescope in Chile, is now believed by astronomers at Oxford to be roughly 7 billion years old — meaning it was already drifting through the Milky Way for nearly 3 billion years before our solar system even existed — having formed in a part of the galaxy called the thick disk, where the stars are older than almost everything else humanity has ever observed
On the morning of 1 July 2025, the ATLAS survey telescope at Río Hurtado in Chile detected an unusual moving point of light against the background stars. Within a few hours, follow-up observations from other telescopes had confirmed the object’s trajectory: this was not a solar-system comet on a long elliptical orbit, but a body […]
