An Interstellar Comet Is Here, and Its Age Is Mind-Bending
This article was updated at 9:00 a.m. ET on Friday, July 11, to include new information. After defending his PhD thesis on modeling interstellar objects on Monday, June 30, Matthew Hopkins intended to take some well-deserved time off. It would appear the universe had other plans for him. The very next day, the Atlas Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) telescope in Rio Hurtado, Chile, detected a mysterious object whizzing toward the Sun. Early observations suggested that it came from o