What are they, you would be wondering.
If I tell you that C/2025 N1 is the designation of the third interstellar comet ever detected by humans, you would know it has the other widely known name as 3I/ATLAS. Its orbit is hyperbolic — meaning it’s moving too fast to be gravitationally bound to the Sun — and the trajectory traces back beyond the solar system. It passed inside the orbit of Mars on its path through the inner solar system, and its closest approach to Earth will be around December 19, 2025 — about 170 million miles away.
Because it didn’t form around our Sun, its composition, structure, and behavior offer a window into how comets, and perhaps planetary systems, elsewhere in the galaxy evolve.
The less-known C/2025 K1 is a more modest comet — a native of our own solar system’s distant Oort Cloud. Astronomers around the world watched in real time as it dramatically broke up into 3 or 4 pieces after its close approach to the Sun, between November 11 and 13, 2025, after surviving perihelion, its closet encounter with the sun.
It’s hard not to feel a sense of cosmic humility when you think about it. In a single year — 2025 — we’ve witnessed two remarkable cosmic events: one object, voyaging across the galaxy, unbound by the Sun’s gravity; another, a quiet resident of our solar system finally succumbing to solar forces after a lonely journey from the Oort Cloud.
It makes me wonder — out there, beyond our telescopes, how many more ices and rocks from distant stars are drifting, awaiting their turn to pay a visit to our neighborhood? ☄
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