Fact-based journalism that sparks the Canadian conversation

Articles Business Environment Health Politics Arts & Culture Society

Special Series Hope You’re Well For the Love of the Game Living Rooms In Other Worlds: A Space Exploration Terra Cognita More special series >

For the Love of the Game

In Other Worlds: A Space Exploration

More special series >

Events The Walrus Talks The Walrus Video Room The Walrus Leadership Roundtables The Walrus Leadership Forums Article Club

The Walrus Video Room

The Walrus Leadership Roundtables

The Walrus Leadership Forums

Subscribe Renew your subscription Change your address Magazine Issues Newsletters Podcasts

Renew your subscription

The Walrus Lab Hire The Walrus Lab Amazon First Novel Award

Amazon First Novel Award

The Endless Wonder and Beautiful Uncertainty of Interstellar Comets

The voyage of 3I/ATLAS sparked new questions about our solar system—and unlocked a longing for cosmic meaning

On December 19, 2025, 3I/ATLAS—a comet from another solar system—quietly made its closest pass to Earth at a distance of 270 million kilometres, nearly twice as far away as the sun. It was my son’s birthday. I thought about the interstellar visitor as my daughter, wife, and I took turns dragging his wandering monster truck balloon back to the table and again, later that day, as he exhaled a wish through the golden candle on his birthday brownie.

Decode the stories behind the headlines with The Walrus newsletter. Sign up for The Walrus newsletter and get trusted Canadian journalism straight in your inbox.

For months, speculation had swirled about this strange comet, with its peculiar features and behaviour, including the fact that its tail pointed toward the sun rather than away from it. Where did it come from? How old was it? Terrestrial and space-based telescopes had trained their lenses on the object, with its nucleus estimated by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Hubble Space Telescope to be between 440 metres and 5.6 kilometres wide, big enough to swallow the entirety of Toronto’s downtown. NASA, the European Space Agency, and the China National Space Administration reprogrammed spacecraft en route to Jupiter and orbiting Mars to snap pixelated photos of 3I/ATLAS. As the comet drifted the closest it would ever be to this insignificant blue dot we call home, I found myself wondering: Was 3I/ATLAS thinking about us?

Since it was first clocked on July 1, 3I/ATLAS—named for the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), a NASA-funded telescope network developed and operated by the University of Hawaii and NASA—had occupied an outsized place in the public imagination, including sincere discussion that it could be alien technology. Maybe people were looking for a distraction from the geopolitical tension dominating the daily news. Or maybe the rise and increasing sophistication of TikTok and YouTube algorithms had amplified the discourse. The United States government funding crisis didn’t help. NASA’s temporary shutdown between October and November created a brief information vacuum that fuelled a conspiracy narrative. Celebrities spread the word. Kim Kardashian tweeted at NASA, asking for clarity about 3I/ATLAS, and Elon Musk mused about the comet on The Joe Rogan Experience, while the comment threads, TikTok explainers, and speculative headlines turned this distant space object into a cultural event.

It wasn’t the first time an interstellar comet sparked a tug-of-war between the limits of scientific reasoning and a culture seemingly desperate for cosmic meaning.

In October 2017, Robert Weryk was sitting in a hotel room in Utah during the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Science conference, parsing through asteroid data, when he came across an object with an unexpected orbit. Weryk is a Canadian astronomer with Western University who works with the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS). Based in Hawaii, the system tracks comets and asteroids whose orbits........

© The Walrus