A mystery interstellar object spotted last week by astronomers could be the oldest comet ever seen, according to scientists, BBC reports.

Named 3I/Atlas, it may be three billion years older than our own solar system, suggests the team from Oxford university.

It is only the third time we have detected an object that has come from beyond our solar system. The preliminary findings were presented on Friday at the national meeting of the UK's Royal Astronomical Society in Durham.

3I/Atlas was first spotted on 1 July 2025 by the Atlas survey telescope in Chile, when it was about 670 million km from the Sun. It is currently visible only with very large telescopes, and it is about the distance of Jupiter from Earth.

Since then astronomers around the world have been racing to identify its path and discover more details about it.

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