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Neat! I haven't been keeping super close tabs on 3I/ATLAS. Was it identified as a comet early or is this a recent development?


> 3I/ATLAS was discovered on 1 July 2025 ... Initial observations of 3I/ATLAS were unclear on whether 3I/ATLAS is an asteroid or a comet ... observations on 2 July 2025 by the Deep Random Survey (X09) at Chile, Lowell Discovery Telescope (G37) at Arizona, and Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope (T14) at Mauna Kea showed a marginal coma with a potential tail-like elongation 3 arcseconds in angular length, which indicated the object is a comet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3I/ATLAS

So, a day or so after its official discovery, maybe a week after its "pre-discovery"


some guy said something along the lines of "all we know is this is a space object, and it's trajectory, a 1 in 100 chance, is exactly the trajectory of AN ALIEN SPACESHIP ATTACKING EARTH!!!!"

I mean, really. Who is surprised it's an asteroids. How many times a year do we see space objects like this per year, 100 times? soooo like 1:100 chance and we see it 100 times a year. Hmmmm. Space alien scientist troll ought to study basic maths.




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