Nearly a year ago, astronomers around the world trained their telescopes on a bright speck whizzing through the Solar System: comet 3I/ATLAS, the third interstellar object (ISO) ever detected in our cosmic neighborhood. Over the following months, researchers learned that the 2.6-kilometer-wide object was racing through the Solar System at 221,000 kilometers per hour.
But a key question remained: Just where—or rather, when—did it originate?
As long as 12 billion years ago, astronomers report today in Nature. Using NASA’s JWST observatory, they measured the comet’s chemical composition and concluded it formed in a star-forming region of the Milky Way, early in the history of the universe. The findings offer a glimpse of other planetary systems and how they compare with the Solar System.
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