It’s an active, icy body ejecting material, and possibly the most important visitor from beyond our solar system yet.
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On July 21, 2025, Hubble locked on to 3I/ATLAS and confirmed what many suspected:
It’s really fast (58 km/s), it’s interstellar (eccentricity > 6)
and it’s active, leaking ice into space.
We’re not just watching it, we’re interacting with it.3/
This makes 3I/ATLAS only the third confirmed interstellar object ever observed after ‘Oumuamua (2017) and 2I/Borisov (2019).But this one we’re catching it in far greater detail.
With ground + space telescopes, spectroscopy and trajectory modeling.4/
Hubble’s imagery shows a fuzzy, comet like coma, a sign of outgassing.But the real revelation came from Gemini South and NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility.
Their combined spectroscopic analysis (published July 22) confirms: water ice is present in the coma.
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Using near-infrared spectra and radiative modeling, researchers found that the coma is composed of:30% large water ice grains.
70% Tagish Lake like dust (D-type asteroid analog)
The ice signal is real and visible in the 2.0 μm absorption band.
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