This is an image of the interstellar comet 3I/Atlas, which at the moment is behaving like a comet, it is creating a cloud of gas and dust in its environment, which all comets do as soon as they begin to receive heat from the sun, their ice sublimates, they begin to be expelled in the form of gas and when expelling those ices in the form of gas, it also drags dust, particles and pebbles, sometimes a larger fragment.
The core was initially thought to be 20 km in diameter, it is now known or the latest estimate is that the core is 11.2 km in diameter. It is still quite a large size, Halley's comet, for example, which has an irregular shape, is 15 km long by 8 km wide and 8 km high, that image above has a cloud of gas and dust that surrounds 3I/Atlas right now, it is 25,000 km long by 22,400 km wide, that multiplies the size of the Earth. The Earth is 12,756 km in diameter.
3I/Atlas is much larger than the other two known interstellar objects, Oumuamua would only be about 240 m long, not kilometers, meters, by 35 wide and 35 long, it is very elongated. Oumuamua, comet 2I/Borisov, which was the second to be discovered and that no one doubted that it was a comet, by the way, not even Abraham Loev, has a diameter of about 500 m; 3I/Atlas we know more or less the trajectory it will follow with quite precision.
On October 3, it will pass about 29 million kilometers from Mars, which is the planet that can be seen closest. It will surely be a great spectacle in the Martian skies. Then, on October 29, it would have its closest approach to the sun, which is the perihelion, passing at about 206.4 million kilometers from our star. The next approach would be on November 3, passing at 97.24 million kilometers from Venus. Look how fast it is going, in just a few months it goes from Mars to pass near the Sun and Venus.
The next planet, the next turn is Earth. It will be December 19 when this interstellar comet 3 and Atlas passes about 270 million kilometers from us, if we are lucky, it may be visible to the naked eye, but it will be difficult. It will then continue its escape trajectory passing near Jupiter on March 16 and will do so at 53,560,000 km from the gas giant.
It is suspected that it comes from a region of the Milky Way, our very old galaxy, it is estimated that it may have an age of 7,000 million years, therefore, it would be much older than the Sun, which is about 4,600 million years old, this is in doubt, because each time this comet has passed, as in this case near a star, its trajectory would have varied a little, therefore, the more billions of years it would have traveled through space and the more stars it would have been near them, the more changes it would have undergone, making it difficult to know exactly where it came from, especially if it really is that old.
In that case, if it were 7 billion years old, it would be the oldest cosmic object we have ever seen in the solar system.
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