Scientists have issued a concerning update on a mystery interstellar object travelling through our solar system.
New data from the Vera C Rubin Observatory has revealed just how big this mystery space rock is.
According to the research, the object is around seven miles (11.2km) in diameter.
This makes the space rock bigger than Mount Everest and the largest interstellar object ever observed.
Some scientists, including Harvard’s Professor Avi Loeb, have suggested the object could be an alien spacecraft.
But this isn’t a commonly held opinion by most experts.
Chris Lintott, an astronomer at the University of Oxford, told Live Science: “Any suggestion that it's artificial is nonsense on stilts.
He called the claim an “insult to the exciting work going on to understand this object.”
More than 200 scientists have confirmed the size of the space object, first published on arXiv.
This comes after scientists discovered a mysterious object in space has been sending an “unexpected” pulsing signal to Earth that is “unlike anything ever seen before.”
The object, which is inside our own galaxy, has been sending signals that are so unique they have completely stumped scientists.
Nasa scientist Richard Stanton, who discovered the signal, said he can’t rule out the possibility that the signal is coming from an alien civilisation.
In a study published in the Acta Astronautica scientific journal, Stanton laid out his discovery of an unexpected ‘signal’ coming from a sun-like star about 100 light-years from Earth in May, 2023.
The signal was a pulse of light from the star that increases, then decreases and then increases again very quickly – something that the scientist says qualifies it as ‘strange’.
Even stranger, though, is that the unique signal from the Ursa Major (Great Bear) constellation was repeated again, exactly 4 seconds after it was first sent to Earth.
The pulses of light were completely identical, which according to the study, has never been seen in previous searches.
The ‘unique’ signal also made the light from its nearby star behave strangely, and made the star “partially disappear in a tenth of a second," according to Stanton.
"In over 1500 hours of searching, no single pulse resembling these has ever been detected," he added.
“The fine structure in the star's light between the peaks of the first pulse repeats almost exactly in the second pulse 4.4s later. No one knows how to explain this behaviour”.
