Comets News 5 September 2025 - 26 October 2025

In recent weeks astronomers have been fascinated by the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS as it rushes through the inner Solar System. First spotted by the ATLAS telescope (Chile) on July 1 ts2.tech, it turned out to be moving so fast on a hyperbolic path that it could only have come from outside our solar neighborhood. Follow-up orbits confirm it is on a one-way trip, never to return ts2.tech. Importantly, orbital calculations show its minimum distance from Earth is about 1.8 AU (far beyond Mars) ts2.tech, so it will not collide with us. In fact, the comet’s closest brush with any planet was

A Rare Interstellar Visitor When astronomers with the Asteroid Terrestrial‑impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) noticed an object with an extraordinarily high orbital eccentricity racing through the outer solar system in June 2025, they immediately suspected an interstellar origin. Follow‑up observations confirmed that the body, now designated 3I/ATLAS, follows a hyperbolic path and moves faster than any known comet, approximately 210 000 km per houresa.int. Unlike periodic comets, this object will never return once it leaves the Sun’s gravitational grasp, making it only the third confirmed interstellar visitor after ʻOumuamua in 2017 and 2I/Borisov in 2019science.nasa.gov. The comet’s trajectory takes it between the orbits

Discovery of Comet C/2025 R2 (SWAN) Comet C/2025 R2 (SWAN) was spotted in early September 2025 in a rather unconventional way – by searching for faint glows in SOHO satellite images. The SOHO spacecraft’s SWAN instrument scans the entire sky in ultraviolet light, primarily to track solar wind interaction with hydrogen. Astrophotographers and amateur astronomers often comb through these SWAN images for telltale moving smudges that betray new comets. On 11 September 2025, Ukrainian amateur Vladimir Bezugly noticed such a moving fuzzball in SWAN’s data Universetoday. Within hours it was confirmed by others and reported, earning the provisional label “SWAN25B”