The Third Interstellar Object: 3I/ATLAS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQUMWA0OuLs

In this talk, I will review the current state of our knowledge of the third macroscopic interstellar object discovered passing through the Solar System: 3I/ATLAS. This object, 3I/ATLAS or C/2025 N1 (ATLAS), was discovered on 2025 July 1 by the ATLAS Survey in Hawaii. I will discuss the discovery, and follow-up observations that were obtained for the object. Finally, I will discuss the possibility of sending a spacecraft from Mars to flyby 3I/ATLAS.

Darryl Z. Seligman completed his undergraduate degrees in Mathematics and Physics at the University of Pennsylvania in 2015. He completed his Ph.D. at Yale University in Astronomy in 2020, and was awarded the Yale University Dirk Brouwer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Ph.D. Thesis. He was the TC Chamberlin Fellow at the University of Chicago Department of the Geophysical Sciences after completing his Ph.D. He is currently a Simonyi-NSF Scholar at Cornell University and Michigan State University, an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship award made in recognition of significant contributions to Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time. He will start as an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Michigan State University in 2025.