Speaker 1: Imagine this for a second. Every single powerful telescope we
have on Earth, you know, the big ground based ones,
plus our eyes in space like Hubble and Web, suddenly
they all pivot, all focused on just one single, really
strange point of light moving across the sky. It's just
a spec sure, but it's a speck that's got the
entire scientific world buzzing, totally captivated. And this isn't just
you know, another asteroid. This thing is heading towards our
Sun fast and it's baffled some of the smartest people
on the planet. It's a puzzle, and as a puzzle
that's about to disappear behind the Sun, hidden from our view,
we're literally in a race against time here, like a
cosmic sprint really, because once it's gone behind the Sun,
that's it. We're left with a huge scientific mystery and
enigma that's already shaking up what we thought we knew. Yeah,
this isn't just another rock floating around. It's something else,
something ancient, something genuinely alien. And when I say alien,
look I don't necessarily mean space ships and little green men.
Although well we'll get to some of the wilder theories later,
because they are pretty provocative, but I mean alien, and
the truth sets foreign.
Speaker 2: From somewhere else, entirely another star system. It's incredibly old,
and just its presence, the way it's behaving, is already
making us rethink things. So our mission right here in
this deep dive is to unpack everything what we know,
which is fascinating, and all the stuff we don't know,
which is honestly just as intriguing. We want to help
you get a handle on what makes this visitor so
incredibly weird, so unique, and why scientists everywhere are scrambling,
basically working twenty towards seven to grab every last bit
of data before this cosmic window closes. Its official name
is three I Atlas. Simple enough, right, It just means
third interstellar object. You know that word interstellar. That's what
always got me, even as kid. I remember lying out
in the backyard looking up at all those stars, just
wondering how does something travel between them? That distances are
just immense, So interstellar means it comes from one of
those distant stars, from a whole the Solar system, somewhere
else in our Milky Way galaxy. It's traveled I mean
an unimaginable distance, probably for an unimaginable amount of time
just to get here. Just wrap your head around that.
Speaker 3: For a moment, and that interstellar tag isn't just a label.
It's really the key, the absolute key to understanding why
this is so significant. We're not talking about, say, something
flung out from the Orc cloud at the edge of
our own solar system, which would be amazing enough, frankly, No,
this object, it almost certainly comes from somewhere really really old,
a star system that could easily be I don't know,
maybe it's twice the age of our own son, maybe
even older. Just think about the sheer cosmic history packed
into it, the different eras of star formation, planet building.
It's like a time capsule from another corner of the galaxy.
And it's quite remarkable. This is only the third confirmed
interstellar visitor we've ever spoted. That really tells you something,
doesn't it. Either these events are incredibly rare, or maybe
just maybe we haven't been good enough it's spotting them
until recently. Just to give you a bit of context,
the first one back in twenty seventeen, that was Umua Muha.
Speaker 4: You probably remember the fuss around that one.
Speaker 3: This bizarre really elongated like cigar shaped thing tumbling through
our system. It was completely perplexing, mostly because it's showed
zero signs of sublimation, no fuzzy coma, no tail as
it got near the sun, which is, you know, fundamentally
what comments are supposed to do. We still don't really
truly know what Umua was. The debate continues. Then came
to Iborisov. Bursov is kind of the underappreciated middle child
now looking back, still incredibly exciting, don't get me wrong,
an object from another's star. But it was well, it
was decidedly less weird than Nua Mua, and certainly less
strange than what we're seeing now.
Speaker 4: With three iyat.
Speaker 3: Lists, Borisov basically looked like a commet, acted like a comment.
Speaker 4: It pretty much was a comment, just one from far away.
Still cool.
Speaker 3: Obviously shows that stuff gets exchanged between star systems, but
it behaved, you know, predictably. But three iat lists our
current visitor. This is rapidly shaping up to be our
best chance, yet our best opportunity to study something genuinely strange,
genuinely alien in that from elsewhere. Since it's like a
classic detective story unfolding in real time every new clue
we find seems to just deepen the mystery, make it
even weirder, more fascinating. Honestly, it's defying expectations left, right,
and center. So what does that mean for us when
something from so incredibly far away, possibly so incredibly old,
behaves so differently from anything in our own cosmic backyard.
This isn't just a footnote for the astronomy textbooks. It
really challenges our basic assumptions about how things form out there,
what they're made of, how they act across the galaxy.
It forces us to widen our perspective, to consider possibilities
we hadn't.
Speaker 4: Even thought of before.
Speaker 5: Speaking of its journey, let's talk about its path because
the speed involved here is just It's one of the
first things that made everyone sit up and take notice,
jaw dropping speed. So the first official sighting was July first,
twenty twenty five. That was by the ATLS system Asteroid
Terrestrial Impact Last Alert System, that's where the name comes
from ATLS, and at that point it was located somewhere
between Jupiter and Mars, still closer to Jupiter, though, But
here's where it gets really interesting, almost comical in a
cosmic sense. We now know it was actually seen even earlier,
back on May seven, twenty twenty five. It was accidentally
picked up by Tests, the Transitting So Planet Survey satellite,
and Tests well, its job is looking for planets around
other stars, right. It was so busy doing that, sifting
through just mountains of data for tiny dips in starlight,
that it completely missed this massive, bright, weird thing cruising
right through his field. If you didn't even register at
the time, and back then in May when Tess annoyingly
snapped its picture, the object was even further out, somewhere
between Satdur and Jupiter. Huh.
Speaker 2: It's like you know when you're tearing the house apart
looking for your keys, absolutely convinced you left them somewhere crazy,
and then you realize they were in your pocket the
whole time, or right there on the counter. Tess was
looking for the expected faint signals from far away and
missed this blazing, unexpected visitor right under its nose. But
that earlier ghost sighting from Tests, it's such a funny story.
It gives us this incredible baseline. It really hammers home
just how unbelievably fast this thing is moving.
Speaker 5: I mean, think about this.
Speaker 2: NASA's Voyager Probes legendary spacecraft, among the fastest things humanity
has ever built.
Speaker 5: When they launched towards Jupiter, it.
Speaker 2: Took them somewhere between eighteen and twenty three months just
to get Jupiter's orbit. Can now hold onto your hat
for three i atlasts. It was your Jupiter in May.
It's whipping past Mars right now in September. It hits
its closest point to the Sun on October twenty ninth,
and by next spring it's already back out near Jupiter's
orbit again heading out. I mean, can you even picture
that kind of speed. It's like a cosmic cannon ball.
It makes you wonder what kind of incredible force flung
it out of its home system, a giant planet, a
stellar explosion, What gave it that velocity.
Speaker 3: And that incredible speed you just described so well, that's
exactly it. That's how we know with absolute certainty this
is an interstellar object.
Speaker 4: It's not just moving fast.
Speaker 3: It's moving too fast, way too fast for our Sun's
gravity to capture it. The technical term is a hyperbolic trajectory. Basically,
imagine throwing a ball upwards. If you throw it hard
enough it escapes Earth's gravity. Right, It's the same principle.
This object has so much kinetic energy. It's just sailing
through our Solar system on a path that will take
it right back out into deep space.
Speaker 4: It won't return.
Speaker 3: If it were one of ours, a comet or asteroid
born here, it would be on an elliptical path, looping
around the Sun over and over. But three I Atlas, Nope,
it's just visiting a high speed tourist. And that extreme
velocity tells us something important about its history too. It
wasn't just you know, drifting aimlessly through space and happened
to wander in. It was likely ejected from its home
system with significant force, maybe a powerful gravitational slingshot from
a huge gas giant, kind of like.
Speaker 4: How we use Jupiter the boost our probes.
Speaker 3: Or maybe it got caught up in some chaotic gravitational
dance in a dense star cluster billions of years ago.
Whatever happened, these hyperbolic paths are unmistakable. They scream outsider,
and that makes three hour Atlas incredibly valuable. It's a sample,
a piece of another star system, delivered right to our doorstep,
offering clues about how things work out there.
Speaker 5: Okay, let's go back to those first test sightings again,
because what's really weird is that even back in May,
when it was way out beyond Jupiter, it was already
looking surprisingly bright, and then just over the three weeks
tests happened to be watching that patch of sky, it
got noticed brighter. Now you might think, okay, it's getting
closer to the Sun, things get brighter. Yeah, sure, generally true,
but for astronomers, the amount of brightening and how early
it started immediately set off alarm bells. This was well
weird compared to typical comments from our own neighborhood. So
usually our comments are these big chunks of frozen water
mixed with rock and dust and gas. Right they hang
out way way out past Neptune and the cold. When
once starts falling towards the Sun, it warms up, and
in space that ice does melt a liquid. It goes
straight to gas sublimation, that's the word, and that's what
makes a fuzzy halo, the coma, and often the tail,
it's the escaping gas and dust. But for our regular
water ice comments, they generally don't start doing that in
big way. Don't get really bright and fuzzy until they
get much closer in, usually after they pass Jupiter's orbit,
heading towards the asteroid belt where the Sun's heat really
starts to bite. But three I Atlas when test first
saw it, remember May seventh, still way beyond Jupiter, and
yet Boom already super bright and getting brighter fast. That
clearly meant significant sublimation was already happening way out there
in the cold. This is not what water ice does.
It's a huge contrast to Omu Wua, which famously showed
no signs of sublimation at all, as just this inert
tumbling rock seemingly. And it's also totally different from two
eyebores off which, okay, it was interstellar, but it acted
like a perfectly normal water ice commet, sublimating predictably. It's
almost like these three visitors are polar opposites, and how
they behave I remember seeing Comet hail Bop years ago,
that amazing tale. It was majestic, but you know, follow
the rules. Three eye Atlass seems determined to break them.
Why what's it made of?
Speaker 3: Exactly that early brightness, that early sublimation is one.
Speaker 4: Of the absolute biggest clues right off the bat.
Speaker 3: It tells us immediately that if three Eyetlias is a comet,
it's made of something very different from the water ice
dominated commets. We know it has to be something much
more volatile, something that turns into gas at much much
lower temperatures than a water ice.
Speaker 4: This isn't just a minor tweak.
Speaker 3: It flags it instantly as a fun unda mentally different
kind of object. It stretches our definition of comet and
hints at different ingredients being common in other star systems.
It's like discovering a whole new category of celestial beast.
But just when we were trying to figure out what
could be causing that early activity, things got even weirder.
As astronomers tracked it through July and August. It developed
a coma, which is normal, and then a tail started
to form, also normal, except the tail started growing in well,
basically the wrong direction. It was initially pointing towards the Sun.
Now to get why that's so bizarre, you have to
remember the Sun isn't just light and heat.
Speaker 4: It's constantly blowing out the stream of charged particles as
solar wind.
Speaker 3: Think of it like a giant fan always on that
solar wind plus the pressure from sunlight itself normally pushes
the gas and dust away from the sun. That's what
forms the classic comet tail, always pointing away. The analogy
I love is the dog sticking its head out a
car window, right the wind pushes its ears and floppy
jowls back.
Speaker 4: It's adorable. We all know the look.
Speaker 3: Now, imagine that dog sticks its head out and somehow
its face stretches forward into the way or its ears
fly forward.
Speaker 4: It makes no sense, does it.
Speaker 3: And that's pretty much why astronomers were, as Source said,
kind of baffled. A tail pointing towards the solar wind source.
It defies basic physics as we understand it. For comments,
it suggests there's some other force at play, or maybe
the particles coming off this thing or interacting with the
solar wind in a completely unexpected way, different charge, different density.
Speaker 4: We don't know.
Speaker 3: It's a fundamental puzzle about how commets actually work, or
at least how this one works.
Speaker 5: Okay, so you've got this object moving it insane speeds,
lighting up way too early, growing a tail backwards. I mean,
the questions were just piling up, right, So that led
to this huge coordinated effort basically pointing all our best
siyes towards it. We're talking Hubble still going strong, the
incredibly powerful James Webspace telescope looking and infra red even
sphere X, you know that sort of cone shaped satellite
that usually maps the early universe. They pointed that at
it too, and tests the one that missed it the
first time. They had to take another look, this time
knowing exactly what to focus on. A real all hands
on deck moment for astronomy. And it seems like NASA's
most advanced observatory, presumably Web gave us some of the
biggest breakthroughs so far. But what this thing's actually made of? Though,
naturally the answer has just led to even more questions.
It's always the way, isn't it? The biggest finding the
real jaw dropper that coma the fuzzy cloud around three
I atlas. It's made almost entirely of carbon dioxide CO two.
Now that immediately tells you this is not your standard
issue water ice comet from our neck of the woods.
It does have some water, they detected that too, but
the ratio, get this, it's eight part CO two for
every one part water. To put that in perspective, that's
something like sixteen times more CO two than you'd typically
expect to see boiling off an average comet in our
solar system. It's completely flipped. And this SETO two cloud
it's enormous. They estimate the radiuses up to three hundred
thousand kilometers. That's what over half the diameter of the Sun.
Just this huge gassy halo, way way bigger than anyone
guessed from those earlier sightings. And seeing that massive cloud
made them rethink the size of the solid core, the
actual object hidden inside. At first Smiths where I be
up to twenty kilometers across. Then they revise it down
maybe eleven kilometers. But now seeing how much CO two
is pumping out, the latest thinking is the solid core
could be as big as forty six kilometers wid which
is big, sure, but not record breaking. We've seen bigger
common nuclei in our own system. The key thing isn't
the size, it's that composition, that overwhelming CO two versus
so little water. We just never seen anything like it.
It's the total opposite of what we'd expect exactly right.
Speaker 4: That's CO two dominance.
Speaker 3: The fact that as one source put it, the ratios
are all wrong. That's incredibly significant. It tells us pretty definitively,
this object formed in a star system with very different
starting materials, different abundances of elements, maybe different temperatures where
it formed compared to where our comets formed. This isn't
just a minor variation. It points to fundamentally different cosmic
chemistry in its birthplace, and that is what makes three
I atlas feel so genuinely alien. Are models for how
planets and comets form, you know, predicting ratios of volatile
stuff like water and CO two based on distance from
the star. Those models are low largely built on what
we see here. This object doesn't just nudge those models,
it kind of blows them up. So yeah, if our
theory say you should get certain ratios depending on where
in the protoplanetary disc, something forms well in eight point
one CO two to water ratio just doesn't fit easily anywhere.
Makes you ask was its parents star different somehow, maybe
lower metallicity or a different type of star altogether, or
did it form incredibly far out in a region far
far colder than even our ort cloud where CO two
ice would be way more common and stable than water ice.
These aren't small questions. They poke at the core assumptions
we make about how universal these formation processes are. This
thing is like finding a biological specimen with a completely
different genetic code. It's a potential Rosetta stone for other
stellar chemistries. And then, as if the totally bonkers CO
two ratio wasn't enough, there was another discovery this summer,
another real head scratcher. This came from observations using the
very Large Telescope down in Chile. And yes, that really
is its name. It's quite literal. It's actually four huge
telescopes working together, very large indeed. Anyway, the VLTA managed
to detect the clear signature of nickel metal in the
coma of three eye outlets. Okay, interesting metals and comments
are unheard of. But here's the kicker. They couldn't find
any trace of iron metal along.
Speaker 4: With it, just nickel.
Speaker 3: Now if that sounds weird to you, good it should,
because it's incredibly weird to the scientific community too. See,
in the universe, iron and nickel are like cosmic buddies.
Speaker 4: Natural partners.
Speaker 3: So there are two most common heavy metals out there,
and that's because they're forged together deep inside massive stars
before they die and then scattered everywhere by supernoga explosions.
It's this epic cosmic process. So because they're made together
and thrown out together, you basically always find them together
in space, rocks, asteroids, planet cores, you name it, Iron
and nickel hand in hand.
Speaker 4: The only time we ever really see.
Speaker 3: Nickel by itself separated from iron is when we do
it humans in industrial processes here on Earth, like making
stainless steel or alloys. So the massive question becomes, how
on Earth, or rather how out there in space did
nick we'll get into this comet's como without bringing its.
Speaker 4: Buddy iron along for the ride.
Speaker 3: It's a great question, and the answer right now is
we have no idea. It's genuinely baffly. This lone nickel
finding just doesn't fit our understanding of how elements are
made and distributed in the cosmos. Does it point some
totally unknown natural process in its home system, some weird
chemical separation in the nebula we've never imagined, or hmm, well,
does it hint at something else, some artificial It's a
finding that just hangs there, challenging everything we thought we
knew about cosmic metallurgy.
Speaker 5: Okay, so let's just recap the weirdness level here. Insane
speed check, lighting up way too early, check, tail growing backwards, check,
totally bizarre co two rich composition check, and now nickel
without iron check. It's like a cosmic mystery checklist, so
inevitably inexorably. This brings us around to well, everyone's favorite
explanation when things get really weird aliens. And look, let's
be fair here that people proposing these more speculative ideas
aren't just pulling them out of thin air, as you
said earlier. What they're doing is take all this genuinely
anomalous data, all the stuff we just listed, and trying
to weave a narrative, a hypothesis, however, speculative that could
potentially explain all of it together. It's thinking outside the box, right,
pushing the boundaries when the standard explanation seems stretched thin.
It's part of exploring the possibility space, even the really
exotic parts. Take the brightness issue again, how did it
get so bright so early, way out past Jupiter. Sure,
getting closer to the Sun helps, but scientists agree it
doesn't explain the sheer level of brightness observed back then.
So the mainstream scientific explanation is well gets packed with
CO two, which the sublimates easily even in the cold
outer Solar system, makes sense vodicle composition, or the more
speculative take, maybe it's an alien probe that started turning
on its systems, powering up its lights as it entered
our solar system, maybe for observation or communication. The brightness
isn't sublimation, it's technology. And what about that gigantic cloud
of CO two, the one almost half the size of
the sun. Well one theory is floating arounds is that
maybe three Ialyis isn't commet at all, but a huge
engineered spacecraft and maybe full of living organisms. Maybe not
like us, but something alive that breathe out CO two
is waste, just like animals on Earth, and they're simply
venting all that waste CO two out into space. Hence
the giant cloud. It's biological exhaust. And then there's the
even wilder idea almost science fiction territory that I've seen. Man,
what if three i Atlis isn't carrying life? What if
it is like a giant, single organism. Maybe silicon based,
maybe something else entirely just cruising through space, consuming dust
and gas for energy and releasing CO two is its
own metabolic byproduct. A living comment that really stretches the
definition of alien, doesn't It makes you reconsider what life
even means on a cosmic scale.
Speaker 3: And here's the really interesting part, the bit that makes
us so compelling Right now, as of today, scientifically speaking,
no one can stand up and say with one hundred
percent absolute certainty that those wilder ideas are wrong. Now,
let's be very clear, it's probably not a giant space
well venting CO two. The scientific principle of Okham's razor
suggests we stick with simpler explanations until the evidence for
rues us elsewhere. But the key point is the data
is so strange, so unprecedented, that our current natural explanations
are also being stretched. They don't perfectly fit everything yet,
so we can't definitively rule out these more extraordinary possibilities
just yet. They remain hovering in that fascinating, if unlikely
realm of not impossible. And the exact same logic applies
to that baffling nickel without iron discovery, since we have
no known natural process that explains it. You can't hand
on heart say it's definitively not artificial. Perhaps it's a
piece of alien technology made with alloys or processes we
don't understand. Again, it's probably not. The bar for proving
alien technology is incredibly high, as it should be. You
need more than just one unexplained anomaly. But that inability
to provide a slam dunk natural explanation keeps the speculative
door slightly ajar. And this uncertainty, this gap between the
strange data and our current understanding, is precisely why everyone
is working so frantically. This is why astronomers are pushing
telescopes to their limits, why engine are calculating trajectories, why
theorists are debating models.
Speaker 4: They're desperately trying to gather more.
Speaker 3: Data, more clues, to close that gap, to learn as
much as possible in this incredibly short window we have
before it gets lost in the sun's glare and then
heads back out into the void. It's the scientific method
in overdrive, trying to move from possible to probable to
understood when faced with something truly unknown, and it forces
all of us, you included, to think critically about evidence, probability,
and how we confront the truly unexpected.
Speaker 5: So time is definitely taking. What chances do we have
left to get a closer look at this thing before
it vanishes behind the sun. Well, there's a pretty cool
opportunity coming up very soon. In early October, three i
Atlas is going to make a relatively close pass by Mars.
It'll come within about twenty eight million kilometers. Now, okay,
twenty eight million kilometers is still a heck of a
long way, but it's close enough apparently for two European
spacecraft currently orbiting Mars. To get a decent look. The
European Space Agency is going to use both it's Mars
Express Orbiter and the XMR Trace gas orbiter. These probes
have really good cameras, high resolution stuff, color imaging systems,
all designed for studying Mars in detail. They're basically going
to turn those cameras outwards for a bit try and
snag some images of three i at Lists as it
flies by. Now, we need to keep expectations realistic, right.
It's not gonna be like a close up from a
sci fi movie. We won't see surface features or alien
riding on the side, but the hope. The real goal
is that the images might be sharp enough to distinguish
between that huge, fuzzy CO two cloud and whatever solid
object is hiding in the middle. If we're lucky, maybe,
just maybe we can get a sense of the actual
shape of the core. Is it long and skinny like ohmmua?
Is it more like a potato or roughly spherical? Just
knowing the basic shape would be a massive clue about
how it formed and what it might be. After that
Mars fly by later on October, it disappears behind the
Sun from our perspective here on Earth. We won't pick
it up again until December, and by then it'll be
well on its way out, heading back towards the outer
Solar System.
Speaker 3: But there is potentially one last chance, final intriguing possibility
for observation as it makes its grand exit on March sixteenth,
twenty twenty six, So about a year and a half
from now, three IAT lists will fly past Jupiter again
at a pretty hefty distance around fifty three million kilometers.
Speaker 4: But here's the interesting bit.
Speaker 3: We have a probe there one very capable spacecraft currently
orbiting Jupiter, NASA's Juno pro Geno's an older mission incredibly successful.
It's been studying Jupiter since twenty sixteen, giving us amazing
data about its atmosphere, its magnetic field, its deep interior. Now,
Geno's primary mission is actually scheduled to end in September
twenty twenty five, next year, and the current plan is
just to deliberately crash it into Jupiter. It's a standard
procedure to avoid contaminating Jupiter's potentially life bearing moons, and
you get some bonus data on the way down. However,
this flyby threeiatis offers a tantalizing alternative, a potentially much
more exciting end of life mission for Juno. Instead of
crashing into Jupiter, Maybe, just maybe, NASA could extend Juno's
mission slightly and tried redirected to intercept threeiatlists as it
flies past Jupiter on its way out. In an older
probe Blake Juno getting relatively close, well fifty three million
kilometers is close in this context, could gather invaluable data.
It could get much better readings of the coma's composition.
Maybe study the particles in that weird tale up close
as it recedes.
Speaker 4: From the Sun.
Speaker 3: Perhaps even detect faint magnetic fields or plasma interactions that
we just can't see from Earth or even with web.
It would be an absolutely fantastic final chapter for Juno,
giving us one last precious data set on this utterly
bizarre object before it loves us forever. So yeah, it's
weird and fascinating as studying this thing has been so far,
the story definitely isn't over yet.
Speaker 4: There's still potentially a lot more to learn.
Speaker 2: Wow, what an absolutely incredible story this is turning out
to be. This deep dive has really taken us on
a journey, hasn't it. We started with that almost misciting
way out past Jupiter, then the mind blowing speed confirming
it came from another star. We puzzled over why it
lit up so bright so early, scratched our heads about
that tail growing the wrong way. Then came the composition shocker,
overwhelmingly carbon dioxide, completely unlike our comments, and topped off
with that genuinely weird discovery of nickel just floating around
on its own without any iron. It's just anomaly after anomaly.
We even dipped our toes into the alien theories, acknowledging
that when the data gets this strange, you have to
at least consider the fringes, even if you know it's
probably not aliens. For you listening, the journey of understanding
three iatlis is happening right now in real time, and
this object, well, it really does put the deep into
deep space, doesn't it. It's a perfect reminder that the
universe is full of surprises, always ready to throw us
a curveball to challenge what we think we know, and honestly,
that's what makes following this stuff so much fun.
Speaker 6: We will get more answers from those upcoming observations, hopefully,
but I bet we'll also end up with just as
many new questions, maybe even deeper ones. And that's the
real excitement of science, isn't it That constant cycle of
discovery and new mysteries.
Speaker 4: It absolutely is.
Speaker 3: And maybe, as we watch three iatlists head back out
towards the interstellar void, here's a final thought to ponder if,
and it's a big if, but worth considering, if this object,
with its weird CO two dominance and solo nickel, actually
represents something normal for comets in its home system, a
system perhaps twice as old as ours. What does that
imply about the raw materials, the basic chemistry available in
other parts of the galaxy, especially in older stellar neighborhoods.
What other completely wrong ratios might be out there. What
other fundamental differences in how elements combine and form celestial
bodies are waiting to be discovered three I atlas. This
one fleeting visitor forces us to confront the sheer, almost
unimaginable diversity that must exist across the Milky Way. The universe,
it seems, has an infinite capacity to astonish us and,
perhaps most importantly, to keep us asking questions.