NASA has confirmed that a mysterious object hurtling towards us is an "interstellar object" that has entered the Solar System. The visitor, officially named 3I/ATLAS by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center, is only the third ever spotted and likely the largest yet. It has been classified as a comet, according to NASA.

These things take millions of years to go from one stellar neighborhood to another, so this thing has likely been traveling through space for hundreds of millions of years, even billions of

Astronomers are scrambling to gather data on a mysterious object that’s currently hurtling through the solar system. Preliminary observations suggest it came from interstellar space, and if confirmed, it would mark the third discovery of an interstellar object in history.