(NewsNation) — A Harvard astrophysicist who has been tracking comet 3I/ATLAS as it hurtles through the Milky Way says it has shown jets coming out of it after it recently passed closest to the sun.
“What we see are seven jets coming out of these objects, more than seven actually, after it passed close to the sun on October 29,” Avi Loeb revealed to NewsNation’s Elizabeth Vargas on Monday. “And we can see that some of these jets are pointed towards the sun, and they penetrate over a million kilometers through the solar wind.”
3I/ATLAS, which will pass closest to Earth in December, has been losing an extreme amount of mass, according to Loeb. The result, he says, could mean the object has potentially exploded into a dozen smaller pieces.
“We know the properties, the density and speed of the solar wind,” added Loeb. “So we can figure out that for a natural comet with the characteristic outflow speed of these jets that come off pockets of ice on a natural comet, given that speed, we can tell that there is a lot of mass carried by these jets so that they can penetrate through the solar wind, about 5 billion tons.”
Loeb also pointed out that the object’s jets may be coming out of thrusters, which can reach much higher speeds for the gas that comes out of them, in which case they don’t require much mass.
“The fuel can be a small fraction of the mass of the spacecraft,” he said. “So the coming weeks will be really decisive.”
Avi Loeb urged NASA to release 3I/ATLAS images last month
In October, Loeb said some answers about the object could be discovered from images of 3I/ATLAS that were taken by NASA’s HiRise camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter around the time the federal government shut down.
The information has not yet been released, he said.
The name 3I/ATLAS derives from the fact that it’s the third known interstellar object to enter our solar system and the fact it was discovered by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System.
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