Spoiler that shit anons. Carrot Top just threw up in his mouth.
Welcoming a New Interstellar Object: A11pI3Z
Avi Loeb 5 min read · 12 hours ago
On the early morning of July 2, 2025, I woke up at 2AM for a two-hour interview on Coast to Coast radio to discuss my research on interstellar objects. This was a fortunate timing as rumors just appeared overnight on X and Bluesky about the discovery of a new interstellar object, A11pl3Z.
Objects originating from outside the solar system are flagged by having a speed above the minimum value needed to escape from the Solar system, which is 42 kilometers per second — a thousand times over the speed limit on a highway — in the vicinity of Earth. The first reported interstellar object, `Oumuamua, was not a familiar comet nor a familiar asteroid. It was inferred to have a disk-like shape and to exhibit non-gravitational acceleration, raising the possibility of an artificial origin. The second reported interstellar object, Borisov, appeared like a familiar natural comet. Will the next object on the interstellar roulette table be anomalous or familiar?
The IAU Minor Planet Center added A11pl3Z to the Near-Earth Object confirmation list on July 1, 2025, with a similar listing appearing on the NASA/JPL CNEOS website. The preliminary fit for the trajectory of A11pl3Z suggests an eccentricity of about 6, a hyperbolic velocity of about 66 kilometers per second and an interstellar origin. Interestingly, this is the typical velocity of interstellar objects that we predicted in a paper that I published with Morgan MacLeod a year ago about the production of interstellar objects from the spaghettification of rocky planets by common dwarf stars.
An extrapolation of A11pl3Z’s orbit implies that its closest distance to Earth would be 2.4 times the Earth-Sun separation (=astronomical unit, abbreviated as AU) on December 17, 2025 and that it will pass much closer to Jupiter around March 10, 2026. This is because the Earth happens to be on the other side of its orbit around the Sun when A11pl3Z gets close to the Sun. Its closest distance from the Sun is expected to be about 1.4 AU on October 27, 2025, three weeks after its passage within 0.4 AU from Mars. The current distances of A11pl3Z are about 3.8 AU from Earth and 4.8 AU from the Sun as of July 2, 2025.
The amateur astronomer Sam Deen identified earlier images of A11pl3Z in the ATLAS Survey from June 25–29, 2025, implying that it is almost certainly interstellar in origin. The amateur astronomer Filipp Romanov stacked 5x20 second images from the iTelescope.Net T72 (0.51-m f/6.8 reflector + CCD) in Chile and detected a G magnitude of 17.5. The H-magnitude of 12 listed by NASA/JPL suggests a diameter of about 20 kilometers. Better data will refine the size estimate as well as the orbital parameters of A11pl3Z.
more at : https://avi-loeb.medium.com/welcoming-a-new-interstellar-object-a11pi3z-0b01f1cb4fbc
and: https://earthsky.org/space/new-interstellar-object-candidate-heading-toward-the-sun-a11pl3z/