Where did interstellar objects 1I/’Oumuamua, 2I/Borisov, and 3I/Atlas come from? And where are they going?

3I/ATLAS, the third interstellar object making headlines today, is the oldest of the three. Kakharov and Loeb wrote in the paper that it has a median age of 4.6 billion years. It originated from the Milky Way’s thick disk, the region where older, lower metallicity stars reside. The researchers say that this shows that “ISOs are ejected from planetary systems throughout the galaxy’s history, not just from young, recently formed systems.”