"Mysterious interstellar object 3I/ATLAS recently made its closest pass of the Sun, or perihelion, brightening up in observations as solar radiation caused it to shed gases at an immense rate. The object, widely believed to be a comet, is losing a staggering amount of mass as it reemerges from behind the Sun - so much, in fact, that Harvard astrophysicist and close 3I/ATLAS watcher Avi Loeb suggests that it may have just broken up into well over a dozen pieces."
"New images taken by British astronomers Michael Buechner and Frank Niebling show the object growing a massive "anti-tail" and a separate, "smoking" trail, jets that extend approximately 620,000 miles towards the Sun and 1,860,000 miles in the opposite direction, respectively, as Loeb notes in a new blog post. "For a natural comet, the outflow velocity of the jets is expected to be [0.248 miles] per second... at the distance of 3I/ATLAS from the Sun," he added."
""At its perihelion distance, the Sun provided 700 Joules per square meter per second," Loeb wrote. "This means that the absorbing area of 3I/ATLAS must have been larger than [617 square miles]," roughly equivalent to a sphere with a diameter of 14.3 miles. That's four times as large as his previous estimate of the object measuring at least 3.1 miles across, with a mass of at least 33 billion tons."
3I/ATLAS passed perihelion and brightened as solar radiation drove intense gas and ice loss. Observations suggest unusually large mass loss and potential fragmentation into over a dozen pieces. Imaging shows an anti-tail and a separate smoking trail with jets extending roughly 620,000 miles sunward and 1,860,000 miles anti-sunward. Expected jet outflow speeds near 0.248 miles per second imply activity persisting 1–3 months. Energy and sublimation estimates indicate an absorbing area exceeding 617 square miles, equivalent to a 14.3-mile diameter sphere, far larger than earlier size estimates and anomalous compared with solar-system comets.
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