Space and Astronomy News for the 12th of July 2025

Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS could be truly ancient

More news following on from last week's announcement of the discovery of the third known interstellar visitor to the Solar System, 3I/ATLAS, which has now been confirmed to be a comet. 

Further observations have put the path of this visitor on a steep incline to the plane of the Solar System, indicating it's from region of the Milky Way where many older stars are located. Findings presented this week at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2025) in Durham by astronomer Matthew Hopkins suggest it could be as old as 7 billion years.  By comparison, the Solar System is around 4.6 billion years.

"All non-interstellar comets such as Halley's comet formed with our solar system, so are up to 4.5 billion years old," Hopkins said. "

But interstellar visitors have the potential to be far older, and of those known about so far our statistical method suggests that 3I/ATLAS is very likely to be the oldest comet we have ever seen."

There'll be a lot more about this in the next week or two as more observations are made. We'll have a detailed update on it shortly. Meanwhile, we suggest you check out this extraordinary animation of Comet 3I/ATLAS as is moves against the background stars. it was captured by astrophotographer Andy Casely with a Celestron C14 from the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. Check the post to the BINTEL Society Facebook page here.

A still image from Andy Casely's video

Interstellar Navigation Demonstration

Speaking of interstellar travel, there are currently three objects made by humans that are headed away from the Solar System into deep-space. They are the Voyager-1 and Voyager-2 probes sent in the 1970s and the New Horizon mission which brought our first close up views of the dwarf planet Pluto and is now travelling into the Kuiper Belt.

For future mission, how can spacecraft "get their bearings" and work out their location and direction? We now establish the positions of probes based on the timing of radio signals from Earth based tracking stations such as NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN). However, these become increasingly week as the distance between us and the probe increases.  Now researchers have a demonstrated a surprisingly simple way to keep track of position in interstellar space and is based on how stars look from Earth compared to how stars look where the probe is. 

As a quick experiment, hold up a pen a few centimetres from the end of your nose. If you close one eye and then the other, the position of the pen will change compared to objects in the background. 

In much the same way, scientists were able to compare how the position of nearby stars against more distant stars change from where New Horizons is located compared to the view from Earth.

How the position of our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, changes when viewed from New Horizons compared to Earth

The technique is more of a proof of concept for now, although likely to be used in future space missions exiting the Solar System.

“This pioneering interstellar navigation demonstration and its accompanying publication show that a deep-space mission can use its onboard imaging system to find its way among the stars,” said Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “While for New Horizons, this method isn’t as accurate as NASA’s sophisticated tracking from Earth, it could be highly useful for future deep space missions in the far reaches of the solar system and in interstellar space.”

Read more here.

3D Asteroid Images - and yes, you have to squint

We talked about NASA's Lucy Mission visit to the asteroid Donaldjohanson in a previous blog entry that you can find here. Now further image processing by the Lucy team has  produced a series of images of the asteroid, designed for viewing in 3D either by using red/green glasses or defocussing your eyes.

A stereo image pair combining the last complete approach image (right) with a slightly clipped image taken 72 seconds later (left). For a three-dimensional view of the asteroid’s structure, cross your eyes while focusing on the image.

Lucy itself is now in a fairly quiet period while it passes through the asteroid belt at about 50,000 km per hour on the way to the Trojan asteroids nearer to Jupiter.  There's another six asteroids it will encounter, the first being Eurybates in August 2027.

If you'd like to see these new images and try to view them in 3D, you can squint here

Celebrate the third birthday of the JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) with the Cat's Paw Nebula

It's been three years since the JWST began its science mission and over that time has produced some ground breaking discoveries and thrilled the planet with some of the most spectacular space images ever taken. 

To celebrate, this week the JWST team released this video showing a wide field pan of the Cat's Paw Nebula (NGC 6334). This is a large, star forming region and a favourite of many of our BINTEL customers to photograph. Check out some of their images here.

“Three years into its mission, Webb continues to deliver on its design – revealing previously hidden aspects of the universe, from the star formation process to some of the earliest galaxies,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “As it repeatedly breaks its own records, Webb is also uncovering unknowns for new generations of flagship missions to tackle. Whether it’s following up on the mysteries of dark matter with NASA’s nearly complete Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, or narrowing our search for life to Earth-like planets with the Habitable Worlds Observatory, the questions Webb has raised are just as exciting as the answers it’s giving us.”

Click on the YouTube video above or read more, including in-depth discussion about the feature of the region here.

Cheers,

Earl White

BINTEL

12th July 2025