Comet 3I/ATLAS continues to captivate the public. The comet is only the third known interstellar visitor to our solar system, and has been repeatedly surprising astronomers as it flies through our cosmic neighborhood.
3I/ATLAS was first discovered in July. It made its closest pass to the sun on Oct. 30, and three sun-facing spacecraft collected images of the wanderer as it zoomed past our star. This imagery revealed that 3I/ATLAS underwent a "rapid brightening" that exceeds what is observed in most comets at similar distances to the sun. In a pre-print study of that imagery published on arXiv, scientists wrote that this new data shows 3I/ATLAS is "distinctly bluer than the sun" in contrast to "earlier observations showing the comet's dust to be red." Numerous media outlets jumped at the chance to declare the comet had "changed color" multiple times and, of course, said it happened for mysterious reasons.
