A mystery interstellar object spotted last week by astronomers could be the oldest comet ever seen, according to scientists.Named 3I/Atlas, it may be three billion years older than our own solar system, suggests the team from Oxford university.It is only the third time we have detected an object that has come from beyond our solar system.The preliminary findings were presented on Friday at the national meeting of the UK’s Royal Astronomical Society in Durham.”We’re all very excited by 3I/Atlas,” University of Oxford astronomer Matthew Hopkins told BBC News. “I’ve just finished my PhD where I spent four years predicting the discovery of [more] interstellar objects, and then for the first time in my studies, we found one,” he said. Based on the object’s speed, Mr Hopkins says it could be more than seven billion years old, and it may be the most remarkable interstellar visitor yet.3I/Atlas was first spotted on 1 July 2025 by the Atlas survey telescope in Chile, when it was about 670 million km from the Sun.It is currently visible only with very large telescopes, and it is about the distance of Jupiter from Earth.Since then astronomers around the world have been racing to identify its path and discover more details about it.Mr Hopkins believes it originated in the Milky Way’s “thick disk”. This is a group of ancient stars that orbit above and below the area where the Sun and most stars are located.The top view of the Milky Way, below, gives a sense of the object’s path around our galaxy. The estimated orbits of 3I/At …
