As the cosmic visitor 3I/ATLAS moves away from the outer solar system, it leaves behind a trail of scientific data that reads more like a high-stakes detective novel than a regular astronomical log. Many people thought the interstellar interloper was just a simple icy wanderer at first, but new observations from the Hubble Space Telescope have sparked a heated debate. Is this thing just a comet from a faraway star, or could it be a piece of advanced alien technology quietly surveying our neighbourhood in space?
On Dec. 12 and again on Dec. 27, Hubble captured high-resolution images of 3I/ATLAS that revealed a stable, double-jet structure behaving in a way few experts expected to see this far past its closest approach to the sun. These images, taken via 170-second exposures with the WFC3 UVIS camera, were processed using a Larson-Sekanina rotation gradient filter to expose the nucleus's activity in unprecedented detail.
