NASA shares new images of interstellar comet

ABC's Jim Ryan reports this comet is NOT of alien origin and will not hit the earth. We can all breath a little easier

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Over to the Legacy Retirement Group dot com phone line.
I want it's been a minute with Jim Ryan, ABC News.
Jim and we've been talking about this, this comet, this
three I at LIS. It's been kind of making news
here the last several months, and NASA had released some
photos and some information yesterday. The reason it's kind of
interesting is it's not behaving like a normal comet. It's

(00:22):
got some unique chemical compositions, it's got some unusual behavior,
it's very fast, it's a comet from outside our solar system.
Some people are speculating that is of some sort of
alien origin. So what did NASA say yesterday about this comic.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
Well, that it's not of alien origin. That it is,
oh shoot, it is traveling very fast, Mike, one hundred
and fifty three thousand miles per hour, and normally our
folks headed out into space are going about seventeen thousand
miles per hour. So this is moving very very fast.
And the point you make there, it does come from
somewhere else, and NASA says that's what explains its anomalist behavior.

(00:58):
The minerals that are appears to be giving off some
of the gases and all. So I think NASA's attempt
yesterday was to try to dispel some of those Internet
rumors about that mic.

Speaker 1 (01:09):
So what is different about it when it comes to
the gases that it's emitting? And is this an opportunity
to learn something new from this comment?

Speaker 2 (01:19):
Sure? Oh absolutely, and it's got a lot to teach us.
I think astronomers who are looking at this thing, it's
giving off nickel, which appears to be something that comments
from inside our solar system don't do necessarily. It's very
very large. I mean the speculation now, and it's a
wide window here, is that it's between fourteen hundred feet
and three and a half miles across, which would be huge.

(01:43):
So we'll get a closer look at it next month,
middle of next month when it makes its closest pass
to Earth on December nineteenth, one hundred and seventy million
miles away.

Speaker 1 (01:53):
It is not a threat to the Earth? Correct?

Speaker 2 (01:56):
No, they say it's going to miss. They've done all
the math, they've run the calculations, they've figured out the
parabolic trajectory of this thing, and they say, no, it's
not going to hit the Earth.

Speaker 1 (02:07):
What is where's it from? Do we have any ideas
that my understanding, it's been traveling for billions of years.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
Yeah, which is crazy, it is, and so and obviously
we don't know where it's coming from, which star system,
or where in the galaxy it might have originated. It's
only the third interstellar object that the human beings have
ever detected, that is that it came from beyond our
solar system.

Speaker 1 (02:28):
Mike, I didn't know that only three of this nature
have The previous two have the same properties as three.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
I atlas, they've been similar to this. But this one
is so large, and we picked it up fairly early
in its trip toward our solar system, and so we
may learn a lot more about this one than we
did from previous comments like this.