Dr. Irbart was having another terrible night. First, he came into a mess in his office which he certainly did not make. Next, his assistant from the university called in sick, but Irbart suspected he was out drinking. Didn't he see that the work being done was important?
Nevertheless, he was on his own for the night, with only the technicians down below to accompany him. Even so, they kept to themselves.
As the night drew on, Dr. Irbart sunk into a funk, monitoring the telescope as it took its images.
At around four o'clock in the morning, the telescope captured its third image, and Dr. Irbart sluggishly began examining the image for any movement...
...and found an object had begun brightening, revealing itself to the telescope.
"Huh," Irbart muttered. He checked it with detailed star catalogs. Could it be a variable star? Or maybe a slowly spinning asteroid? But no. It was an entirely new object. It also showed a small amount of movement.
He logged the object in the journal as X/2024 M1 and smirked. Finally, he had discovered a heavenly object. An unimportant one, but one nonetheless.
How wrong he would be proven to be.
Two days later, after careful tracking of the object "Irbart", it was determined that it was an interstellar object. Not only that, but its orbit intersected Earth's orbit by a very slim margin.
As the computations were run, it slowly dawned on Dr. Irbart that the object had a very high chance of impacting Earth within the next ten years. And since the object, presumably, a comet, was discovered so early, it had to be massive, at least 50 km large. The information would have to be confirmed by space telescopes, but it was concerning nonetheless.
Keeping a tight lid on the discovery, an international conference is called in Oahu to determine what, exactly, would be done about this information.