The icy traveler, called 3I/ATLAS or Comet ATLAS, was discovered on July 1 by the NASA -funded ATLAS survey telescope in Río Hurtado, Chile. This enormous space snowball came from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius and is about 300 million miles from Earth right now.

COLUMBUS, Ohio — In a cosmic first for this decade, astronomers have identified a mysterious comet from another galaxy — marking only the third time in history that an interstellar object has entered our solar system.