Comet 3I/ATLAS’ upcoming encounter with the solar might change it in large methods — Space photograph of the week

Even as a superb, naked-eye comet slices by Earth’s sky (cheers, Comet Lemmon!), essentially the most well-known object within the photo voltaic system proper now’s hidden on the far aspect of the solar: the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS.

This alien customer, which most astronomers imagine to be a comet originating from an unknown star system far past our personal, is barely the third interstellar object ever detected in our photo voltaic system. It is the biggest, fastest-moving, and fairly probably the oldest interstellar object ever seen.

Though it was simply confirmed by NASA in early July, the freewheeling ball of ice and dirt is already nearing the midway level on its tour of our photo voltaic system. This Wednesday (Oct. 29), 3I/ATLAS will attain perihelion — its closest level to the solar — earlier than starting its months-long departure from our cosmic neighborhood.

We’ll miss our interstellar pal, however no less than we’ll all the time have the images. The picture above, captured Aug. 27 by the National Science Foundation-operated Gemini South telescope in Chile, would be the clearest picture we’ve got to this point. As 3I/ATLAS zooms nearer to the solar, radiation from our star heats the ice on the comet’s physique (its nucleus), inflicting geysers of fuel and dirt to shoot outward and type a glowing plume (a coma) round it. Radiation stress from our star’s unrelenting photo voltaic wind pushes this materials into a protracted, distinguished tail angled away from the solar.