Just after midnight in a part of Planet Earth known as Massachusetts, a team of scientists who track comets and minor planets in the solar system announced that they had spotted something new: a spark in the southern sky, visible in the data they were getting from a telescope in Chile.
The telescope, high in the Atacama Desert, is tasked with searching for objects that might collide with Earth. “We at the Minor Planet Center have the role to collect the information and also to post it quickly, almost in real time, on our website if the object is somehow interesting,” said Peter Veres, a Harvard astronomer sometimes described as an air-traffic controller for the solar system.
