The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the best pictures yet of our newest interstellar visitor.
This comet from outside our solar system is zooming by us at a blistering 177,000 km/h.
Hubble caught some glam shots over the weekend from a distance of 420 million kilometres. The photos were released Wednesday.
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It's the second known interstellar visitor to swoop through our solar system. An amateur astronomer from Crimea, Gennady Borisov, discovered the comet in August, two years after the first alien guest, a cigar-shaped rock known as Oumuamua, popped up.
"Whereas 'Oumuamua' appeared to be a rock, Borisov is really active, more like a normal comet. It's a puzzle why these two are so different," David Jewitt of the University of California, Los Angeles, who led the Hubble observation team, said in a statement.
On the other hand, it's "very remarkable" that the comet's properties appear to be similar to those of our own solar system's building blocks, said Amaya Moro-Martin of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
Polish astronomers using ground telescopes, meanwhile, have reported the comet — called Comet 2I/Borisov — looks to be reddish with a nucleus about 2km across.
The comet will make its closest approach to the sun in December and reach Jupiter's distance by mid-2020, before heading back toward interstellar space.
Hubble — along with other telescopes — will be on the lookout into next year.
- AP