With the Help of the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA Finds the Origin of Comet 3I/ATLAS

We tend to think of comets as ancient relics of our own solar system, but interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS carried 30 times more heavy hydrogen than any comet formed around our Sun, a chemical fingerprint pointing to a birthplace so cold and so old it may predate the Sun itself

Most comets are treated as leftovers from a local story. They formed with the planets, spent billions of years in the cold outskirts of the Solar System, and occasionally fall inward, warming just enough for sunlight to pull gas and dust from their surfaces. Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is different from the start. NASA says the object was first reported by the ATLAS survey telescope in Chile on 1 July 2025 and was quickly recognised as interstel…

Postperihelion Optical Low-resolution Spectroscopy of Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS

Postperihelion Optical Low-resolution Spectroscopy of Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS, Kawakita, Hideyo, Tsujimoto, Ko, Shinnaka, Yoshiharu, Kobayashi, Hitomi, Ootsubo, Takafumi, Watanabe, Jun-ichi

With the help of the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA finds the origin of comet 3I/ATLAS

The water and carbon in 3I/ATLAS reveal an extremely cold and ancient origin, possibly in a planetary system that formed during the early stages of the Milky Way's evolution.Comet ATLAS caused a stir after being identified as an interstellar visitor.Comet 3I/ATLAS entered the Solar System with a composition unlike that of any known local object, leading some to speculate it could be an alien spacecraft. In reality, it was simply the third confir…