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Why are astronomers interested by 3I/ATLAS?
While it’s certainly an interstellar customer from past our photo voltaic system, most astronomers are assured that 3I/ATLAS is only a regular comet.
Well, regular within the sense that it is pure. 3I/ATLAS is definitely fairly wonderful as comets go, being the oldest ever seen and the most massive of its kind, not to mention only the third interstellar object ever recorded.
This means that researchers will carefully study new images of the comet for clues to its makeup, origins, and a better understanding of the journey it took to arrive at our cosmic backyard.
Comets heat up as they fly closer to stars, causing ice on their surface to sublimate into gas, which researchers can then detect and study. Previous observations have already revealed that comet 3I/ATLAS appears to be unusually rich in carbon dioxide, with potentially a thick irradiated crust from billions of years of exposure to cosmic rays.
The comet’s irradiated nature could make it more difficult to decipher the properties of its material that would otherwise reveal more about the conditions of its home star system. Still, researchers still have a lot to learn about interstellar comets, and just having more data on this one is as good a start as any.
Other images taken by HiRISE
HiRise has imaged vast areas of the Martian landscape in unprecedented detail, according to NASA. Check out the HiRise web site, hosted by The University of Arizona, to scroll by hundreds of previous HiRise images.
What is HiRISE?
The as-of-yet unreleased comet 3I/ATLAS photographs have been taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The orbiter has been flying round Mars since 2006, trying to find indicators of water on the Red Planet. The HiRISE digicam managed to get photographs of comet 3I/ATLAS because it zoomed previous Mars in early October.
The photographs are anticipated to be the highest-resolution photographs of comet 3I/ATLAS but, and even clearer than the Hubble Space Telescope’s comet snaps taken in July, the New York Post has reported.
Here’s a choice of a few of our 3I/ATLAS tales to date
Patrick Pester
Everything you might want to learn about 3I/ATLAS
So what’s 3I/ATLAS? And why do people care?
3I/ATLAS, which was first discovered in early July, is the third interstellar object ever found in our solar system. That means it doesn’t come from our cosmic neighbourhood, but from somewhere else in our Milky Way galaxy.
Where exactly in our galaxy the comet came from is unclear — scientists aren’t sure whether or not it got here from the Milky Way’s ‘skinny’ disk or its ‘thick’ disk — however relying on its origins it could possibly be greater than 7 billion years outdated, making it greater than 3 billion years older than our solar. Tracing 3I/ATLAS’s origins is made much more difficult by its materials, which has been reworked by billions of years of publicity to cosmic rays.
Telescope observations recommend the comet is roughly 7-mile-wide (11 kilometers) and zooming at greater than 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h). Having handed perihelion, or the closest level to our solar, roughly two weeks in the past, 3I/ATLAS is now zipping towards its closest level to Earth on Dec. 19.
The unique comet has many peculiar properties, from its chemical composition to its giant measurement. This, alongside radio alerts coming from it which can be typical of all comets, has fuelled a frenzy of hypothesis that the 3I/ATLAS is an alien probe.
That’s nearly definitely not the case, but it surely does not imply that astronomers aren’t excited to review it. Investigating the comet may yield recent insights into the circumstances round different stars, our early galaxy, and the huge frontier of interstellar house.
NASA set to share finest photographs of comet 3I/ATLAS but
Good morning, science followers. We’re again with extra updates on the comet 3I/ATLAS. Following the end of the U.S. government shutdown, we’re seeing reports that NASA is ready to launch a number of the best-quality photographs but of the comet.
The photographs have been taken by the HiRISE digicam aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and will have considerably higher decision than these by the Hubble Space Telescope on July 21, 2025.
We’re attending to work on what all of this might imply for the rapidly-brightened comet, which is roughly 7-miles (11 kilometers) huge, greater than 7 billion years outdated, and touring at 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h) because it sheds its highly-irradiated coma throughout our photo voltaic system.
Ben Turner