"Spotted in early July, the object, dubbed 3I/ATLAS, is widely believed to be a comet. It's traveling so fast that one look at its speed was enough to let astronomers know that it came from untold thousands of light years away. And it may even be older than our entire solar system. Now, the James Webb Space Telescope has turned its mighty eye - specifically, its Near-Infrared Spectrograph instrument - towards the object, furnishing us with more details about its size and composition"
"These findings were published in a by researchers at NASA and a host of universities, currently awaiting peer review. And one detail in it is especially tantalizing, as highlighted by Space.com: 3I/ATLAS has among the highest ever ratio of carbon dioxide to water ever observed in a comet. And it also appears that the ice entombed within the comet may have been exposed to higher levels of radiation than comes from our solar system, the authors found."
3I/ATLAS is an interstellar object traveling at a velocity indicating origin from thousands of light-years away and possibly predating the solar system. Near-infrared spectroscopy by the James Webb Space Telescope measured its size and composition. The object exhibits one of the highest carbon dioxide-to-water ratios recorded in a comet and shows signs that its ices were exposed to higher radiation levels than typical solar-system comets. The object displays cometary activity, including a coma. Comets form in large numbers during planetary system formation and can be ejected by gravitational encounters, making 3I/ATLAS a pristine sample of extrasolar planetary-system material.
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