The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the best picture yet of a high-speed comet visiting our solar system from another star.
NASA and the European Space Agency released the latest photos Thursday.
Discovered last month by a telescope in Chile, the comet known as 3I-Atlas is only the third known interstellar object to pass our way and poses no threat to Earth.
Please hit us.
Just hit the US, and make it contained—no spilling or fallout on Canada
Tap for spoiler
/s
That won’t fix anything. Our cancer has already metastasized.
Yeah, I know…
Even a comet shaped like the US hitting every square mile would fuck the planet up for millions of years. You’re talking about a planet wide extinction event. Be real here.
Just a tiny one…? That upon breaking, would it just the right spots? Looney Tunes style?
Sarcasm meets Sarcasm lol. Exactly the shape, out lying islands even. Break up into an Alaska shaped one as well, just for fun.
I like your optimism.
It’s aliens! It can only be aliens scouting our system! I wrote an entire book about it! Buy my book! Other scientists don’t want to do real science!
Oh, wait, wrong comet.
Actually, I think he’s already saying that this one is aliens as well.
The Hubble still works?
That’s nice, I thought I read an article some years ago that it was going to be decommissioned.
Its to bad we can’t like blast something like a voyager on to these kind of things. Its like 4 or 5 times faster than them.
Actually, there’s a project called Breakthrough Starshot that’s working on exactly this - developing tiny light-sail probes that could potentially intercept passing interstellar objects and send back data, though the challange of matching those incredible speeds is still a major hurdle for our current technology.
oh I was thinking just impact into it like the one japanese sattelite and hijack its speed.
That is crazy fast. That’s almost freaking 2 hundredths of a percent of the speed of light.
It’s only like 3x as fast as the Voyager Satellite.
If we’re talking about Voyager 1, it should be at about 42 km/s now according to the graph on Wikipedia. 130,000 mph is about 0.019 % of c. 42 km/s is about 0.014 % of c. So this comet is about one third faster than the Voyager 1.
Btw I don’t think the Voyager space probes are considered satellites? They don’t orbit the earth, nor the sun. Not sure about that one though.
The linked video is about the bullseye galaxy, not the comet.
Trump states that this was actually discovered the week before by an american republican. MAGA! /s
Great. Does it prefer tea or coffee?
The vogons don’t care. They’re just here to clear the way for the highway.
Blood
I hope they’re coming to save us from facists, oligarchs and technofacists ….if not maybe they will just do us all a favor and make it quick
It’s going to be on the opposite side of the sun from us when it passes.
Avi Loeb is a crackpot who has been pushing these kinds of bullshit “interstellar alien spacecraft” ideas ever since Oumuamua (we now have naturalistic explanations for his objections on that comet), mostly for money and fame. He also pushes the usual “crisis in science” rhetoric other grifters such as Eric Weinstein love:
And his YouTube appearances don’t really make him seem any more trustworthy:
I hope it never reappears in December just to spice things up.
