Given 3I/ATLAS' highly eccentric orbit, this will be its one and only visit to our solar system, as its trajectory does not loop back around the sun. That's why astronomers around the world are using a wide variety of telescopes to observe the comet during its brief visit, before it returns to interstellar space.

New simulations have narrowed down where the newly discovered interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS likely came from, revealing it could be more than 3 billion years older than the solar system.