Pictures of 3I/ATLAS will soon be all we have to remind us of the strange interstellar comet and its brief visit to our cosmic neighborhood.
Fortunately, thanks to the world's space agencies, we'll have quite the photographic collection of the intriguing object, which in 2025 attracted plenty of buzz when it became the center of an alien spaceship conspiracy theory.
NASA officials and scientists have long pushed back on the notion that 3I/ATLAS is extraterrestrial in nature, but that doesn't make the comet any less fascinating. Because 3I/ATLAS's time in our solar system is fleeting, the world's astronomers and space agencies have been racing to study planetary material that formed from another star.
Among them, a European Space Agency orbiter bound for Jupiter spotted and imaged 3I/ATLAS toward the end of 2025. And images beamed back from that rendezvous only recently reached us on Earth.
Here's what to know about 3I/ATLAS, and a look at the ESA's new photo of the interstellar comet.
