&imwidth=800&imheight=600&format=webp&quality=medium "3I/ATLAS images live streamed from Italy: 'Clearly a comet', astronomer asserts")
The Virtual Telescope Project live-streamed shots of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS on November 19. Gianluca Masi, an Italian astrophysicist and astronomer, shared real-time observations of the comet with his viewers. The images showed a bright object with a coma and a clear tail. The live stream lasted for about 40 minutes, with Masi detailing everything that has been observed about 3I/ATLAS. He stressed several times that it is clearly a comet and has been noted to be one ever since it was first discovered on July 1. "I am so happy that the Virtual Telescope Project is making history once again, bringing no less than such an exceptional object live to you," Masi said. He also shared an inverted image of the comet to make the tail clearer.
He added that 3I/ATLAS is quite clearly visible now from Earth. It reached perihelion, its closest point to the Sun, on October 29 and has since continued to brighten. "It was clear from the beginning that this object was pretty special. It was moving pretty fast at the time of discovery. At the time, it was 670 million kilometres from the Sun, around the distance of Jupiter from the Sun. It was moving very fast, 61 km/sec," Masi said during the live stream.
3I/ATLAS is clearly a comet, and nothing else, Masi said
Masi reiterated that 3I/ATLAS is a comet and nothing else, quashing all speculation that it could be an alien spacecraft or something else. "The cometary nature was pretty clear after it was discovered. I fail to understand why any other kind of idea is spread so much despite the clear nature of this cometary object," he said. Notably, Harvard scientist Avi Loeb has pointed out several anomalies in 3I/ATLAS, stating that it is not behaving like a regular comet. He even claimed that it could be an alien mothership coming to probe Earth and the other planets in the solar system. Masi also talked about the anti-tail that 3I/ATLAS has, saying that such features are common on comets. So there is nothing odd about it, Masi said.
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Meanwhile, 3I/ATLAS has brightened and can easily be found in the morning sky using a telescope or binoculars. It currently has around 10th magnitude brightness. A photo taken on November 17 shows a classic blue-green coma and an ion tail, as shared by Sky and Telescope. "Now that the Moon has departed the morning sky, it's possible to glimpse its dim gas tail, which points to the northwest," amateur astronomer Bob King wrote.
