Hubble has taken a good, long look at our Earth's newest interstellar visitor, 2I/Borisov

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the best pictures yet of our newest interstellar visitor.

This comet from outside our solar system is zooming by us at a blistering 110,000 mph (177,000 kph). Hubble caught some glam shots over the weekend from a distance of 260 million miles (420 million kilometers). The photos were released Wednesday.

[caption id=“attachment_7512251” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] The comet 2I/Borisov as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. image credit; AP[/caption]

It’s the second known interstellar visitor to swoop through our solar system. An amateur astronomer from Crimea, Gennady Borisov, discovered the comet in August, two years after the first alien guest, a cigar-shaped rock known as Oumuamua, popped up.

“It’s a puzzle why these two are so different,” David Jewitt of the University of California, Los Angeles, who led the Hubble observation team, said in a statement.

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Hubble has given astronomers their best look yet at an interstellar visitor — comet 2I/Borisov — whose speed and trajectory indicate it has come from beyond our solar system: https://t.co/v1F4WB9ZLE pic.twitter.com/3aHymNCi5r

— Hubble (@NASAHubble) October 16, 2019

On the other hand, it’s “very remarkable” that the comet’s properties appear to be similar to those of our own solar system’s building blocks, said Amaya Moro-Martin of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

Polish astronomers using ground telescopes, meanwhile, have reported the comet — called Comet 2I/Borisov — looks to be reddish with a nucleus about 1 mile (2 kilometers) across.

The comet will make its closest approach to the sun in December and reach Jupiter’s distance by mid-2020, before heading back toward interstellar space. Hubble — along with other telescopes — will be on the lookout into next year.