New 3I/ATLAS image shows strange jets shooting out of interstellar object

Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is displaying two anti-tail jets and a longer jet in the other direction in a new image shared by two British astronomers. They shared that the photo was taken on November 9 and "is heavily processed to show the antitail and the smoking tail. It is a combination of a picture series taken with two telescopes, which Michael Buechner and Frank Niebling shared. While the object once again has a tail, what baffles scientists is the other jets that seem to be directed towards the Sun. Harvard scientist Avi Loeb wrote that the picture shows "two anti-tail jets out to 10 arcminutes towards the Sun accompanied by a longer collimated jet." The sunward jets measure 0.95 million kilometres, while the tail jetting away from the Sun is about 2.85 million kilometres long. This is way bigger than the "glowing halo around 3I/ATLAS" captured by the Hubble Space Telescope on July 21.

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Probes won't be able to intercept jets from 3I/ATLAS

Loeb says the size of the jets means that particle probes on Earth-based satellites won't be able to capture the particles since 3I/ATLAS will be 269 million kilometres at its nearest point from Earth, about a hundred times larger than the extent of the jet structure seen in the latest images. He says, the same goes for NASA’s Juno spacecraft around Jupiter, which will observe it on March 16, 2026, from a distance of 53 million kilometres. ESA’s JUICE spacecraft, travelling to Jupiter, is currently 64 million kilometres from 3I/ATLAS and won't be able to intercept these jets either.

Loeb has pointed out a strange feature of the jet. He cites that the solar wind flows at a speed of about 400 kilometres per second, a thousand times larger than the outflow speed from a natural comet. But in case of the anti-tail seen in 3I/ATLAS, the outermost mass density "is a million times bigger than that of the solar wind." He inferred, based on the observations and his calculations, that the diameter of 3I/ATLAS must be bigger than five kilometres. "If it is a natural comet and most of its nucleus survived perihelion, then the diameter of 3I/ATLAS should be 10 kilometres or larger. He once again raised doubts over its mass, which is likely over 50 billion tons, at least a million times more than the inferred mass of 1I/`Oumuamua. This, he says, is almost impossible to happen before we see much smaller interstellar objects.