Mystery deepens as 3I/ATLAS’ tail could be comprised of a ‘swarm’ of unknown objects: Harvard scientist

This might be more than a tail of fire and ice?

Comet 3I/ATLAS has displayed a variety of atypical traits, from its bizarre trajectory through our solar system to a complex jet structure.

Now, Harvard Scientist Avi Loeb claims he’s discovered another non-cometary anomaly: a sun-facing “anti-tail” comprised of a swarm of objects.

In a new Medium blog post, the astrophysicist wrote that November images of ATLAS shot after perihelion showed a teardrop shape in its coma — the halo of gas and dust that forms around the solid nucleus when the comet approaches the solar star — that was pointed toward the sun.

Loeb postulated that if 3I/ATLAS is accompanied by a swarm of objects that don’t share the dirty snowball’s non-gravitational acceleration, they would seem closer to the sun compared to the comet.

That’s because “3I/ATLAS is pushed away from the sun relative to the objects through its non-gravitational acceleration,” asserted Loeb, who also outlined his theory in a preprint draft posted to arXiv.

“At the current separation of 3I/ATLAS from the Sun of 270 million kilometers (167,770,221 miles), the displacement would imply that the objects are closer to the Sun than 3I/ATLAS by about 54,000 kilometers (33,554 miles),” he wrote. “This separation is comparable to the sunward elongation of the teardrop glow around 3I/ATLAS.”

Loeb added that this so-called cosmic entourage would boast a much larger surface area than 3I/ATLAS even if their total mass was only a fraction of the comet’s.

“This swarm would create the appearance of a coma that reflects 99% of the sunlight in the glow around 3I/ATLAS,” he declared.

As of yet, the researchers postulated that it’s unclear if said objects are of natural or artificial provenance.

“If the anti-tail is indeed associated with a swarm of non-evaporating objects around 3I/ATLAS, the interesting question is what is the nature of these objects?” Loeb wrote. “Are they rocky fragments or something else?”

However, earlier this month, Loeb postulated that the comet’s anti-tail indicated that the entity is potentially emitting a beam of light used to sweep tiny meteors out of its path.

“The extended glow is ahead of the object, not trailing it as expected for a cometary tail,” Loeb previously told The Post. “In the case of a technological object, it could be a beam of particles or light illuminating the path forward to avoid the hazards of micrometeorites.”

Currently, NASA’s official position is that 3I/ATLAS is a comet from an unknown star system.

And, despite hailing from the cosmos, the interstellar iceball could potentially have a surprising amount in common with objects in our own solar system.

Researchers found evidence during the interloper’s approach of the sun, a series of cryovolcanoes — colloquially known as “ice volcanoes” — erupted on its surface, Livescience reported.

The yet-to-be-peer-reviewed findings indicate that comet 3I/ATLAS shares similarities with the icy trans-Neptunian objects — dwarf planets and other objects orbiting the sun beyond Neptune, per a November study published to the preprint server arXiv.

“We were all surprised,” Josep Trigo-Rodríguez, a staff leading researcher at the Institute of Space Sciences (CSIC/IEEC) in Spain, told the outlet. “Being a comet formed in a remote planetary system, it is remarkable that the mixture of materials forming the surface of the body has a resemblance with trans-Neptunian objects, bodies formed at [a] large distance from the Sun but belonging to our planetary system.”