Hey, I'm Flor Lickman, and you're listening to Science Friday. Today in the show, an attention-hogging, larger-than-life celebrity that everyone, and I mean everyone, seems to be talking about. Comet 3-E-E-A, Atlas. This dirty snowball is a visitor from another solar system, and it's only the

third interstellar object we've ever found. And today, today, it's closer to us than ever before,

a mere 170 million miles away. So naturally, space nerds like my next guess and me are really excited about

this, but 3i has permeated the astrophysicist bubble and captured the spotlight in a way that I think

maybe no other big hunk of rock ever has. We will talk about that too. Here to dish about this

interstellar luminary are my

guests, Dr. Stephanie Milam and astrochemist at NASA who studies comets and interstellar objects,

and Dr. Hakeem Olusheye, an astrophysicist who runs the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

Stephanie Hakeem, welcome back to Science Friday. Thanks for having me.

Yes, thank you.

Stephanie, I know interstellar objects are your jam.

How pumped are you right now?

Super excited.

This has been a whirlwind of a year since the discovery in July,

and we are getting amazing data from telescopes on this object and

learning more and more each and every day about its origins, where it's from, and comparing that

to objects in our own solar system. I want to drill into that in a second, but, Hakeem, I know you're a space,

more of a space generalist.

Does it, does this rise to the same level of excitement for you?

Oh, it definitely does. And, you know, I'm just impressed with the field, right? It just keeps giving from images of supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies to gravitational

waves of black holes colliding,

to now, you know, interstellar objects coming into the solar system.

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