The comet is hurtling our way at 130,000 mph, but will veer closer to Mars than Earth, keeping a safe distance from both.<\/p>\n
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the best picture yet of a high-speed\u00a0comet visiting our solar system from another star.<\/a><\/p>\n NASA and the European Space Agency released the latest photos Thursday.<\/p>\n Discovered last month by a telescope in Chile, the comet known as 3I-Atlas<\/a> is only the third known interstellar object<\/a> to pass our way and poses no threat to Earth.<\/p>\n \u201cNo one knows where the comet came from. It\u2019s like glimpsing a rifle bullet for a thousandth of a second. You can’t project that back with any accuracy to figure out where it started on its path,\u201d said David Jewitt of the University of California, Los Angeles, science team leader for the Hubble observations.<\/a><\/p>\n Astronomers originally estimated the size of its icy core at several miles (tens of kilometers) across, but Hubble\u2019s observations have narrowed it down to no more than 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometers). It could even be as small as 1,000 feet (320 meters), according to scientists.<\/p>\n The comet is hurtling our way at 130,000 mph (209,000 kph), but will veer closer to Mars than Earth, keeping a safe distance from both. It was 277 million miles (446 million kilometers) away when photographed by Hubble a couple weeks ago. The orbiting telescope revealed a teardrop-shaped plume of dust around the nucleus as well as traces of a dusty tail.<\/p>\n The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute\u2019s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.<\/p>\n Copyright 2025 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The comet is hurtling our way at 130,000 mph, but will veer closer to Mars than Earth, keeping…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":70295,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[79,193],"class_list":["post-70294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70294\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}