Press enter or click to view image in full size The Hubble Space telescope image of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS on 21 July 21, 2025. The glow of scattered sunlight is elongated ahead of the object towards the Sun and shows no cometary tail in the opposite direction. The short, light blue diagonal streaks are background stars that move during …
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Press enter or click to view image in full size Three images of 3I/ATLAS, taken by the SPHEREx Space Observatory. The images were observed at wavelengths of 3.0, 4.26, and 4.7 micrometers, corresponding to prominent emission lines of H2O, CO2 and CO gas, from left to right respectively. 3I/ATLAS is undetected in H2O and CO. By contrast, a bright CO2 …
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Press enter or click to view image in full size Avi Loeb’s research notes on 3I/ATLAS (August 24, 2025). Before my morning jog at sunrise, I sketched a model for the dust outflow around the new interstellar object, 3I/ATLAS, which appears as a fuzzy glow in the image obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope on July 21, 2025. One of …
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Press enter or click to view image in full size The image of 3I/ATLAS imaged by the Very Large Telescope in Chile on July, 4 2025 (left) along with its projected surface brightness profile. The angular resolution of our best telescopes is about a thousand times worse than necessary to resolve an object which is a few kilometers in size. …
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Press enter or click to view image in full size A panoramic image of the 100 billion stars in the Milky-Way galaxy. (Image credit: ESO/S. Brunier) Let us imagine for a moment that the new interstellar object, 3I/ATLAS is a spacecraft, guided to send mini-probes that will arrive at Earth and other planets in the coming months. Given the limited …
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Press enter or click to view image in full size The retrograde trajectory of 3I/ATLAS is perfectly aligned with the plane of the planets around the Sun, with a random chance of 1 in 500. Was this path designed by alien intelligence? (Image credit: theskylive.com) Science is fun. It offers an opportunity to learn something new, as long as we …
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Press enter or click to view image in full size (Image credit: Max Barry/Nation States) A simple way to distinguish a spacecraft from a rock is through its large non-gravitational acceleration. A natural icy rock like a comet is propelled by its mass loss. That mass loss can be observed through the cometary plume of gas and dust that surrounds …
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Zoom image will be displayed The Hubble Space Telescope image of 3I/ATLAS shows diffuse emission that extends ahead of the object as it approaches the Sun. The yellow and green arrows mark, respectively, the projected negative heliocentric velocity vector and the projected anti-solar direction. (Image credit: Jewitt et al. 2025) Today, two new papers about 3I/ATLAS were posted online. The …
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Zoom image will be displayed The interstellar object 3I/ATLAS was discovered in a region of the sky that is crowded with stars, making it difficult to notice. The discovery image by the ATLAS telescope is shown in the inset image bracketed by the red box, which provides a zoomed-in view of the region where 3I/ATLAS was discovered. (Image credit: ATLAS/University …
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Zoom image will be displayed Intensity maps of 3I/ATLAS from stacking datasets collected on the 4th (top row) and 29th (bottom row) of July 2025, showing no visible cometary tail. The arrows point the directions to the Sun, north, east, and the negative velocity vector of the comet as seen on the plane of the sky. (Image credit: Santana-Ros et …
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