This New Interstellar Object Could Possibly Be The Oldest Comet Ever Seen
The interstellar object 3I/ATLAS could be around 7 billion years old - 3 billion years older than our solar system, according to the University of Oxford researchers. The hyperbolic course of 3I/ATLAS, compared to other comets that originated in the solar system, proves it is not from our solar vicinity.
Astronomer Matthew Hopkins of the University of Oxford stated that "all non-interstellar comets, such as Halley's comet, formed at the same time as the solar system, so they are up to 4.5 billion years old."
But this potentially "water ice-rich" visitor could be much older, and their statistical approach indicates that "3I/ATLAS is very likely to be the oldest comet we have ever seen" out of those that are now known, per Space.com.
3I/ATLAS was initially observed by the Atlas survey telescope in Chile on July 1 at a distance of roughly 670 million kilometres from the Sun.
It is approximately the distance between Earth and Jupiter and can only be seen at this time with very large telescopes, the BBC reported.
This is the third known visitor from space, after 1I/'Oumuamua in 2017 and the comet 2I/Borisov in 2019. However, 3I/ATLAS appears to have retained a large amount of its volatile material, such as dust and ice, compared to its predecessors, allowing scientists to see its coma and tail more vividly.
The secret behind 3I/ATLAS's advanced age is that it comes from a totally different region of the Milky Way than earlier interstellar visitors.
The object was most likely generated in the Milky Way's "thick disk," an area of old stars that circles both above and below the thin plane where most stars are found, given its extremely steep trajectory.
"This is an object from a part of the galaxy we have never seen up close before," Chris Lintott, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford, said.
Since then, the comet has been floating across interstellar space, with a "two-thirds chance this comet is older than the solar system," he added.
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