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A comet going 130,000 mph is visiting our solar system from another star. The Hubble telescope just took its picture. (www.cbsnews.com)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the best picture yet of a high-speed comet visiting our solar system from another star.

NASA and the European Space Agency released the latest photos Thursday.

Discovered last month by a telescope in Chile, the comet known as 3I-Atlas is only the third known interstellar object to pass our way and poses no threat to Earth.

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[-] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

That is crazy fast. That's almost freaking 2 hundredths of a percent of the speed of light.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

It’s only like 3x as fast as the Voyager Satellite.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

If we're talking about Voyager 1, it should be at about 42 km/s now according to the graph on Wikipedia. 130,000 mph is about 0.019 % of c. 42 km/s is about 0.014 % of c. So this comet is about one third faster than the Voyager 1.

Btw I don't think the Voyager space probes are considered satellites? They don't orbit the earth, nor the sun. Not sure about that one though.

this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2025

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