A large comet is making its way through our solar system, Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb told Newsmax on Friday.
The 3I/ATLAS comet, the size of Manhattan Island, is speeding by so fast it could fly from New York to Los Angeles in just one minute.
Loeb told "Finnerty" the comet will come within 19 million miles of Mars on Friday allowing for NASA to get high resolution images of the comet.
"We will learn much more about it in the coming days, and hopefully, the data will be out soon," Loeb said. "Science is fun because we can learn from evidence."
The astrophysicist noted there were seven anomalies about the object, including its large size, about a thousand times more massive than the previous interstellar comet.
"There was an unusual chemical composition containing mostly nickel without iron," Loeb said. "There was a polarization of light never seen before for comets. And the trajectory of 3I/ATLAS is aligned with the planets around the sun. The arrival direction of ATLAS was coincident with the direction from where we got the most powerful radio signal back in 1977 that was called the Wow! Signal."
Discovered in July, the comet poses no threat to Earth or its neighboring planets. It will come closest to the sun at the end of October. Throughout November, European Space Agency's Juice spacecraft, which is headed to Jupiter and its icy moons, will keep an eye on the comet.
The comet will make its closest approach to Earth in December, passing within 167 million miles.
Observations by the Hubble Space Telescope put the comet's nucleus at no more than 3.5 miles across. It could be as small as 1,444 feet, according to NASA.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Sam Barron ✉
Sam Barron has almost two decades of experience covering a wide range of topics including politics, crime and business.
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