Mysterious Object Screaming Toward Mars Is Huge and Far More Massive Than Scientists Thought, According to New Paper

"By analyzing its trajectory, Loeb and his colleagues found that its "non-gravitational acceleration" was "smaller than 49 feet per day, squared," in a recent blog post. We also know how much mass it was shedding in the form of gases and dust particles. From this data, Loeb inferred that the "mass of 3I/ATLAS must be bigger than 33 billion tons.""

""Consequently, the diameter of its solid-density nucleus must be larger than [3.1 miles]," he concluded, roughly at the very top of the range of current estimates, based on Hubble Space Telescope observations. It's a notable conclusion, considering that it would make 3I/ATLAS "three to five orders of magnitude" more massive than either 'Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov, which measured roughly a quarter mile and 0.6 miles in length, respectively."

"To Loeb, it's yet another confounding piece of evidence that highlights the object's sheer rarity, considering how few interstellar objects we've detected so far. "Given the limited reservoir of heavy elements, we should have discovered on the order of a hundred thousand interstellar objects on the 0.1-kilometer scale of 1I/'Oumuamua before finding 3I/ATLAS, yet we only detected two interstellar objects previously," he wrote in h"

Observations identify 3I/ATLAS as a rapidly moving interstellar visitor with unusually high carbon dioxide content. Trajectory analysis measured non-gravitational acceleration smaller than 49 feet per day squared while monitoring mass loss from gas and dust. Combining the acceleration limit with measured mass loss yields a lower bound on total mass exceeding 33 billion tons and implies a solid-density nucleus diameter exceeding 3.1 miles. That inferred size places 3I/ATLAS at the upper end of Hubble-based estimates and renders it orders of magnitude more massive than 'Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov, implying unexpected rarity in interstellar object detections.

Read at Futurism