All newsEducate

Science

C/2024 L5 (ATLAS)

9/3/2026

C/2024 L5 (ATLAS)

C/2024 L5 (ATLAS) is a comet that was discovered on 14 June 2024 as A117uUD by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), South Africa, Sutherland. It reached perihelion on 10 March 2025 at 3.432 AU (513.4 million km) from the Sun. It is the second known Solar System comet to become interstellar after experiencing a planetary encounter. C/1980 E1 (Bowell) reached a hyperbolic traj

Ask Teacher Smith questions about this articleOpens your AI tutor with a question about “C/2024 L5 (ATLAS)” →

C/2024 L5 (ATLAS) is a comet that was discovered on 14 June 2024 as A117uUD by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), South Africa, Sutherland. It reached perihelion on 10 March 2025 at 3.432 AU (513.4 million km) from the Sun. It is the second known Solar System comet to become interstellar after experiencing a planetary encounter. C/1980 E1 (Bowell) reached a hyperbolic trajectory after an encounter with Jupiter on 9 December 1980. C/2024 L5 experienced a very close encounter at 0.0048 astronomical units (720,000 km; 450,000 mi) with Saturn on 24 January 2022. C/2024 L5 could be a former retrograde, inactive centaur. The receding velocity of C/2024 L5 when entering interstellar space will be 2.8 km/s, moving towards the constellation of Triangulum.

---

This article is an automated import of the Wikipedia article "C/2024 L5 (ATLAS)", available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2F2024_L5_(ATLAS) . Text is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.