"Not only is this comet from another solar system, it's almost as old as the universe. Hi everyone, astrobiologist here with an exciting update on the interstellar object that continues not to be aliens. Comet 3i Atlas was discovered in July of 2025 and was immediately declared to be an alien spacecraft by astronomy's own Florida man, Avi Loeb. However, recently, serious scientists have determined that not only is it a comet, it's also 10 billion years old. To learn this, NASA scientists used the James Webb-based telescope to measure the gases coming off the comet. What they found was extremely high levels of a gas called deuterium, which is basically just fat hydrogen. There's a neutron in there with the proton. The thing about deuterium is that it was all made in the Big Bang. The universe simply isn't making any more of it. Stars burn deuterium as they age, so as time goes on, there's less and less of it. The fact that Comet 3i Atlas has 30 times the amount of deuterium that a solar system comet does implies that it must be much older than our solar system, about 10 billion years old. And a brand new study supports this. A European collaboration found that in addition to fat hydrogen, this comet is also highly abundant in fat carbon and fat nitrogen. These fat atoms, which are usually referred to as isotopes, are very fragile, which tells us that this comet must have formed in a very cold environment far from its star. This era of the universe is known as Cosmic Noon. The Milky Way this star was born into was much different from the galaxy we live in today. It was in a cannibalistic star-forming situation ship with another galaxy known as the Gaia Sausage. The solar system that gave birth to 3i Atlas was probably a child of this messy merger. So 3i Atlas and its fat atoms continue to not be alien, but they're still extremely interesting survivors of one of the earliest epics of our universe, and one that has a lot to tell us about the embarrassing relationships of our galaxy's past. I'm Dr. Sevan Rasmussen, and if you like your science content as unhinged as it is educational, pre-order my book, Cloudy with a Chance of Starship, out from Princeton University Press on August 4th."