James Webb Telescope CONFIRMS 3I/ATLAS Is Much Bigger Than We Thought

When 3I/ATLAS was first spotted, astronomers assumed it was another interstellar comet. After all, we had seen this before with ‘Oumuamua and Borisov—strange objects from other star systems swinging past our Sun and vanishing into the void. But 3I/ATLAS immediately set itself apart. It wasn’t just its trajectory or its velocity that raised eyebrows—it was how it behaved.

Unlike typical comets, which develop a visible coma of water vapour and dust when they approach the Sun, 3I/ATLAS stubbornly refused to follow the script. No coma. No tail. No water. Instead, it emitted only carbon dioxide—and in large quantities—while remaining eerily silent in all other spectrographic readings.

NASA pointed the powerful infrared spectrometer aboard the SPHEREx Observatory at the object, expecting to find confirmation of water or carbon monoxide—two gases almost always present in comets. But the result? Nothing. Just carbon dioxide. No water. No carbon monoxide. A chemical profile never before recorded in the history of space observation.

What kind of object emits CO₂ exclusively? The answer was unsettling: none that we know of. Not even the strangest comets in our solar system match this behaviour. And if it wasn’t acting like a comet, and it wasn’t an asteroid… then what was it?

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