Maikalani Public Talk

Interstellar objects and near-Earth asteroids: how we find them, what they're doing, where they're going

The UH-operated ATLAS telescope system scans the dark sky around the world each night to search for asteroids that might threaten the Earth. In the last year, ATLAS has made two notable discoveries: asteroid 2024 YR4, an asteroid that was predicted to possibly impact the Earth in 2032, and comet 3I/ATLAS, the third object discovered to have an origin well outside our solar system. In this talk, I'll describe how ATLAS finds these objects, what we have learned about them so far, and what the future holds for these objects and the ATLAS system.