As the 3I/Atlas interstellar object approaches its closest point to the Sun next month, the mysterious visitor continues to fascinate astronomers. The object, a kite that came from outside the solar system, It has already been observed changing shape. Its tail has lengthened and its coma (the extensive atmosphere of gas and dust that surrounds its nucleus) has become more visible.
These are expected characteristics of a kite that approaches the sun at vertiginous speeds (more than 200,000 km/h), although numerous readings made with sensitive space telescopes They have also discovered that it has unusual properties that will be studied for years.
And that adds a surprise: the comet hunter Michael Jäger and his colleagues “took advantage of the total lunar eclipse to take a deep image of comet 3i/Atlas under the dark skies of Namibia,” according to a post on social networks. His observations showed that the object comma It has gone from emitting red to green, another turn in the odyssey of the unusual interstellar visitor through our solar system.
For the Past Few Days, The Interstellar Comet 3i/Atlas Has Been Displaying A Blue-Green Coma Measuring 2.5 Arcminute Across. A Short Tail Was Also visible on SEPTEMBER 9 WHEN Photography with the 12 & quot; /f-3.6 Astrograph in Namibia. Image Gerald Rhemann, Michael Jäger pic.twitter.com/n3rxvyn3n8
– Michael Jäger (@komet123jager) SEPTEMBER 10, 2025
This statement may seem banal coming from an amateur astronom It has photographed more than a thousand, a feat taking into account that 4,000 comets are known to date.
Regarding color, Harvard Avi Loeb astronomer in a recent publication of his blog about the findings, this It could be due to a “pronounced increase in cyanide production.”
Scientists raise the hypothesis that the production of this chemical, together with Nickel’s, is drastically increasing as 3i/Atlas approaches the sun.
The data of the Atlas Telescope team, which detected for the first time the object and that gives its name to the space rock, suggest that the “anomalous evolution” of the object is going from the “dispersion of sunlight by the dust raised from a red surface to the production of small grains of optically bright ice, which They modified the opacity of the material column detached by 3I/Atlas”
Although Loeb has repeatedly raised the possibility that 3i/Atlas is an “extraterrestrial device” sent by an intelligent alien breed, The observations are increasingly solid to affirm that it is simply a kitealthough from a place far beyond our solar system.
For Loeb, however, it is still an exception. On the one hand, the observations have shown that The object is “dominated by carbon dioxide”up to 87% of its mass, according to Loeb.
The astronomer has also discovered that his orbital trajectory, which takes him relatively close to Mars, Jupiter and Venus, is extremely unusual, which makes “3i/Atlas curiously anomalous compared to the usual icy rocks”