[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] The interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS has displayed behavior never before seen in a comet.
In August, the Two-Meter Twin Telescope in the Canary Islands captured an image showing a faint jet extending roughly 3.7 miles from the object's nucleus, pointing toward the sun.
This stream of gas and dust is unusual because comet tails are typically pushed away from the Sun by solar radiation and wind.
Harvard professor Avi Loeb said on Friday: 'The existence of an anti-tail pointed toward the sun is an anomaly that raises two questions: What is the nature of the anti-tail?
'Why are comet experts ignoring this anomaly while insisting that 3I/ATLAS is a familiar comet?'
Weeks earlier, the Hubble Space Telescope observed a similar phenomenon, capturing an extended glow aimed sunward in late July.
Loeb explained that the glow stretched roughly ten times longer than it was wide, forming what he described as the geometry of a jet directed at the Sun, a pattern unlike any known comet.
'Realizing this is as shocking as photographing an animal your family thinks is a street cat, only to see a tail coming out of its forehead,' Loeb said.
He noted that while many specialists hailed the Hubble image as evidence that 3I/ATLAS behaves like a comet, they overlooked the critical detail: the jet points the wrong way.
Both the Hubble and ground-based observations show material moving toward the Sun, contradicting the physics that normally shape comet tails.
Loeb suggests the unusual orientation could indicate the object is ejecting large, heavy particles less affected by sunlight, or that an entirely new type of outgassing mechanism may be at work.
The professor has speculated that 3I/ATLAS could be of extraterrestrial origin, the moment it was identified in July.
Loeb said there is a 30 to 40 percent chance the object 'does not have a fully natural origin,' noting the possibility it is a 'Trojan Horse,' where a technological object masquerades as a comet.
| I would love to see how he came up with that probability, because it sounds like wishful thinking to me. |
However, the world could soon know the answer when 3I/ATLAS makes its closest approach to the sun on October 29.
The object should 'disintegrate into fragments' if it is a comet.
| What about comets that come around periodically? Halley’s Comet has been recorded as appearing about every 80 years for almost two millennia without disintegrating. |
|