That’s all Tom Bickle, Martin Kabatnik, and Austin Rothermich needed to find a celestial object rocketing through the Milky Way at roughly one million miles (1.6 million kilometers) per hour.

At a cool billion light years across, a distant complex of galaxy superclusters may be the largest structure yet found in the cosmos. Individual galaxies like our own Milky Way are bound together ...

But if the Cosmos 482 object is indeed a Soviet reentry capsule, it would be equipped with a substantial heat shield, meaning it “might well survive Earth atmosphere entry and hit the ground ...