Sometimes, "the universe comes to us," writes the European Space Agency — the third time now since 2017. What is it and are we prepared?

Late in the evening on July 1, a telescope in Chile that is part of the global, NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) picked up on a new moving dot in the sky, an object traveling past the orbit of Jupiter.

The third interstellar object detected has been named 3I/ATLAS and was discovered on July 1 from Chile. Astronomers from the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands are tracking it with several telescopes in Tenerife.