Tag: Interstellar objects
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The buzz over an ‘alien’ interstellar comet shows how way-out speculation goes viral
An astrophotograph of the interstellar comet known as 3I/ATLAS highlights its green coma and a wandering blue-tinted ion tail. (Copyright Victor Sabet and Julien De Winter, republished with permssion) Is an interstellar spacecraft zooming through our solar system? That’s the big question for fans of unidentified flying objects — and for a researcher at the…
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NASA backs concepts for deep-drilling Mars rover and interstellar-object probe
An illustration shows the deployment of an autonomous borebot into a layered deposit on Mars. The inset shows a closeup of the borebot drive system. (Planet Enterprises Illustration / James Vaughan) The latest crop of NASA-backed concepts for far-out space exploration includes “borebots” that could drill as far as a mile beneath the Martian surface…
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Hubble image shows distant galaxy photobombing an interstellar comet as it swings around the sun
Comet 2I/Borisov appears as a bright dot within a haze of dust, with a distant spiral galaxy in the background of the Hubble Space Telescope image, taken on Nov. 16. The comet was about 203 million miles from Earth when the picture was taken. (NASA / ESA / UCLA / D. Jewitt) The Hubble Space…
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Hubble gets snapshot of interstellar comet
Pictures captured by the Hubble Space Telescope show the second known interstellar object, 2I/Borisov, in all its cometary glory. The images were taken by the telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 on Oct. 12, when 2I/Borisov was 260 million miles from Earth. The object was discovered by Crimean amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov in August, and since…
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Experts confirm that a second interstellar visitor is zipping through solar system
A two-color composite image from the Gemini North Multi-Object Spectrograph in Hawaii shows the interstellar object 2I/Borisov. Blue and red dashes are images of background stars that appear to streak due to the comet’s motion. (Gemini Observatory / NSF / AURA Image / Travis Rector) Two years after astronomers made their first detection of a…