Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS gets the closest it’ll ever get to Earth today, getting a ‘mere’ 167 million miles (270 million kilometers) from our planet.
The bizarre cosmic visitor has been making headlines and baffling experts since it was discovered back in July. NASA have dismissed the space lump as anything other than a comet, while some fanciful theories about it being an alien spaceship have also been bandied about.
Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb is one of the most vocal in the “3I/ATLAS is extraterrestrial” camp. The academic has highlighted several “anomalies” which mark it out from your run-of-the-mill comet, for example it has two jet tails pointing to some sort of technological aspect.
“The foundation of pioneering scientific research is the humility to learn rather than the arrogance of expertise,” Avi says, with those squares at NASA in mind.
Although it’s as close as it’ll ever get today, 3I/ATLAS still won’t be visible with the naked eye. So don’t all line the streets with your handkerchiefs and wave at it while it zooms off towards the Sun.
Instead, you’ll need an eight-inch telescope to have a glance – or if you don’t have that then X-ray vision. There will also helpfully be a livestream shared by the Virtual Telescope project at 4:00 am UTC on Friday.
The European Space Agency’s X-ray space observatory XMM-Newton also had a peak at the comet on December 3 for nearly 20 hours using its most sensitive camera. A unique image released by the agency shows the red X-ray glow of the comet.
Japan’s X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission, or XRISM, observed 3I/ATLAS for 17 hours in late November with its Xtend telescope.
These observations might reveal exactly what the comet is made of and just how similar or different the object is from those in our own solar system.
Images taken of 3I/ATLAS back in November were recently released, showing the asteroid in all its glory. Writing in a blog post on Medium, Loeb believes that this object was travelling from a distance of “164million kilometres”.
Looking at various pictures of the asteroid being captured, Loeb said: “With 3I/ATLAS passing between Europa Clipper and the Sun, the vantage point of Clipper’s observations provided a unique perspective.
“The sunward viewpoint provided a downstream view of the anti-tail and tail stemming out of the nucleus of 3I/ATLAS when it went close to the Sun.”
