What is this racing car that goes at full speed towards the sun? For astronomers who detected it, on July 1, this interstellar visitor is a comet from outside our solar system.
It is the third time in the history of humanity that astronomers have managed to detect an interstellar object, a real racing car from outside our solar system, and which fuses at more than 60 km/second, more than 200,000 km/hour towards our sun. And it is precisely this extreme speed, much faster than that of an “ordinary” comet but also its direct line trajectory, which indicates that this racing car does not gravitate in orbit around the sun, but actually comes from elsewhere: interstellar space.
Network astronomers NASA asteroid monitoring atlas, Who detected him, with their network of telescopes installed in Chile, in Hawaii and South Africa, first verified that what he thought was an asteroid presented no risk of collision. Fortunately ! No danger, he will pass through the orbit of Mars, but will remain far from the earth in his race towards the sun.
It is by compiling all observations and measures data that the CBetween minor planets of the international astronomical union Requalified it as a comet, that is to say a celestial object whose nucleus is made of ice and which is reactive when approaching the sun, unlike asteroids considered as dead bodies. And they even gave it a name for this interstellar comet, the largest and fastest ever observed, a name not very poetic, but informative, it is the comet 3i atlas.
What means?
3i for the 3ᵉ interstellar object detected by the Atlas network. Knowing that the very first interstellar object detected in 2017 had aroused a great excitement. You may remember Oumuamua A very strange racing car of elongated shape Who had caused a lot of ink and that a renowned scientist had even taken for an extraterrestrial vessel. This was completely denied by research. And then in 2019, it is a comet named 2i Borisov Who has been detected and it is probably only the beginning, because astronomers think that many small racing cars, of interstellar bodies cross our solar system without being able to spot them. Let us add that the 3i Atlas comet is the largest, the fastest, probably also the oldest of only three extrasolar objects identified so far.
Will it be possible to see this extra-solar comet pass?
But yes and that’s what’s extraordinary. Notice to amateur astronomers and our network of astronomers on the continent, it will be possible to observe the flash passage of this comet in our solar system with a telescope, a telescope see simple twins. The magazine Sky and space Even gives advice to photograph her: from July 15 in a moonless sky. Currently, it is 3.5 astronomical sun units, 4.5 times further from our star than the earth, very exactly in the constellation of Sagittarius. It will get closer to the Constellation of Scorpion, before passing through the orbit of Mars and reaching in mid-October its closest point in the sun, about 200 million kilometers from our star, once and a half the distance of the earth in the sun. You know almost everything on this comet, as staggering as it is intersidereal, which spins towards our sun.
