When I heard the news that an interstellar object had been spotted hurtling into our Solar System, my thoughts were:
1) Okay. Surely that's not a rare thing, is it?
2) Uh... is it an alien?
Turns out that while there probably ARE a tonne of objects winging their way through our Solar System from 'elsewhere', it is rare indeed to spot them: this is only the third interstellar object we've ever seen (hence the name, 3I/ATLAS, with ATLAS being the telescope project that spotted it).
And no, it's not an alien spacecraft, although there was a moment of speculation about instellar object number one, back in 2017, that the weird cigar-shaped strangely-accelerating object was alien. It wasn't.
It was great fun to chat with the people involved with the find. Check my story at Nature:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02141-5
PS - perhaps one day there will be something out there, somewhere, that notices Voyager 1 or 2 passing by, and yes indeed we will be the alien visitors... strange thought. It looks like Voyager is going about 1/4 the speed of this sucker.
PPS here's a great animation of our planetary orbits and 3I's trajectory. I asked: no, there is no chance it will hit Mars.
https://bsky.app/profile/
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