"But the surprises just keep coming. The mysterious entity, which was first spotted hurtling towards the Sun from far beyond in early July, has fascinated researchers ever since. As Science Alert points out, a quartet of powerful telescopes - NASA's Hubble, SPHEREx, Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), and James Webb Space Telescope - have now turned their powerful gazes to observe 3I/ATLAS."
"For one, SPHEREx and James Webb observations have both shown that its coma, which a large atmosphere of gas and dust that surrounds a comet's nucleus, bears a much higher proportion of carbon dioxide gas than expected. In fact, scientists found it to have the highest carbon dioxide to water ratio ever observed in a comet. TESS, which had technically already spotted the object months ahead of its July discovery that were later found in its archived observations,"
3I/ATLAS is the third detected interstellar object and is being observed by Hubble, SPHEREx, TESS, and the James Webb Space Telescope. Observations indicate a cometary nature but with anomalous properties, including the highest carbon-dioxide-to-water ratio ever measured in a comet and coma composition dominated by CO2. Archived TESS data show activity when the object was about six astronomical units from the Sun, unusually distant for cometary activity. Hubble imaging reveals a teardrop-shaped dust cocoon around the nucleus without a distinct cometary tail. The object's origin remains unknown and will motivate extended comparative study.
Read at Futurism
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