What We Know About The Interstellar Object That Has Suddenly Appeared In Our Solar System...

Reference: Found here

Is it an alien spaceship or an ancient comet? That's the question puzzling UFO enthusiasts, NASA, and the European Space Agency since an interstellar visitor entered our solar system last month.

It seems everyone has been talking about the unidentified object, and there's been a lot of speculation about its origin.

It's only the third known interstellar visitor to pass through our solar system, after 'Oumuamua (2017) and 2I/Borisov (2019), published reports say.

The Hubble Telescope and its Wide Field Camera 3 shed some light on the object's composition when it caught a clear view of what experts say is likely a comet on July 21 when the object was 277 million miles or 445 million kilometers from Earth, CNN reported.

The image appears to be "a teardrop-shaped dust cocoon" that was spotted streaking from the comet's "icy nucleus," the report said.

A comet's nucleus is its solid core, often comprised of ice, dust and rocks. When comets travel close by stars, heat causes them to output gas and dust, the report explains.

The object also has an unusual appearance: The Hubble images show the teardrop-shaped cocoon of dust, but some experts have said its lack of a visible tail makes it atypical for comets.

According to published reports, one theory about 3I/ATLAS's origin is that it's a thick disk of the Milky Way, a region above and below the galaxy's thin plane that is populated by older stars and an abundance of ancient material.