An object might have come to us from outside of our solar system, scientists said.
It would be just the third time that we have spotted an “interstellar object” of this kind.
But researchers are still checking whether the object really is a visitor from another star system.
For now, the object has been temporarily given the name A11pl3Z, and astronomers are tracking it with telescopes across the world to understand what it is and where it might have come from.
The first confirmed interstellar visitor was ʻOumuamua, which was first spotted in 2017. It has gone on to prove mysterious: features including its strange, elongated shape even led to speculation that it could be an alien spacecraft.
The second known object was 2I/Borisov, found in 2019.
Scientists believe that many more such objects regularly pass by the Earth, with a number of them flying relatively near to us each year. But many of them go undetected, because they are hard to spot and it is difficult to know for sure where they have come from.
Scientists hope to eventually learn more about them and even use them as a kind of evidence of distant star systems and planets.
They also hope to find more of them in the years to come, thanks to new and more powerful telescopes such as the recently switched-on Vera C Rubin Observatory.
