El Sauce Observatory , Chile under the night sky.

Photograph: Obstech/El Sauce Observatory

Jul 9th 2025|4 min read

ON THE NIGHT of July 1st, in a remote corner of Chile, a small robotic telescope noticed something moving in the sky. What at first seemed a routine detection of an object travelling through the solar system soon turned out to be anything but. The object’s trajectory revealed it to be a much rarer visitor than first thought. Formed around a distant star elsewhere in the Milky Way, it is an interstellar wanderer, not a merely interplanetary one.

Baby bottle with measurement markings and a smiling pink nipple on a blue background.

Astronomers have spotted an interstellar comet older than the Sun