New Interstellar Comet Spotted: It's Called 3I/Atlas

It is called 3I/Atlas and is located 510 million kilometers from Earth. It is the new interstellar comet discovered at dawn on July 1, 2025. It is rapidly approaching the Sun and last night it was observed by the Loiano telescope of the Inaf, in the province of Bologna. It is the second comet after 2I/Borisov. The discovery was not very easy because, even if bright, the comet is in the dense star fields of the constellation of Sagittarius, in the middle of the Milky Way.

The passage to perihelion (the point of minimum distance of a body of the Solar System from the Sun) will occur on October 29th, while the minimum distance from the Earth will be reached on December 19th.

The comet was initially considered an asteroid, in fact it was inserted in the Neo Confirmation Page of the Minor Planet Center with the designation A11pl3Z , immediately confirmed by dozens of other observatories. The observations however indicated the presence of a very small tail only three arc seconds long which identifies the new interstellar object as a comet .