In July 2025, the ATLAS sky survey in Chile spotted a faint comet racing through the solar system at roughly 130,000 miles per hour — and follow-up orbit calculations quickly showed it was not bound to the Sun at all, but had arrived from interstellar space.

On July 1, 2025, the ATLAS survey telescope in Rio Hurtado, Chile, reported a faint moving object to the Minor Planet Center. At first, it looked like another small body being picked out of the crowded background of the sky. That is what surveys like ATLAS are built to do: find moving points of light [...] The post In July 2025, the ATLAS sky survey in Chile spotted a faint comet racing through the solar system at roughly 130,000 miles per hour — and follow-up orbit calculations quickly showed i