The Paranormal, UFO's, and Mysteries of the Unknown

MusicForFish said:

Pretty wild. We can already see it, and it's now blue. Paper in the comments.

Click to expand...

We can mostly only see it with the instruments that designed to look at the sun now, those are the observations they used for that paper. Still a while before all the earth based optical telescopes can see it again.

The Blue shift was unexpected - and the brightening that was noted in the same paper is extreme. The scientists who wrote that paper just said they don't know what could be causing the brightening at that level. They say, "The reason for 3I’s rapid brightening, which far exceeds the brightening rate of most Oort cloud comets at similar r (C. E. Holt et al. 2024), remains unclear."

Just a day or two after that (like 1-2 days ago) a report was filed by a guy at JPL showing the first significant non-gravitational acceleration observed. for 3I/Atlas. Angry Astronaut video below claims it is the 2nd highest non-gravitational acceleration ever observed for a "comet," behind only Oumouamoua. It displayed magnitudes higher acceleration than is observed in most solar system comets - the only comets that have ever come close to that acceleration were very close to the sun, like 0.1 AU. But 3I/Atlas is still at like 1.3 AU.

Sounds like all 3 of these recently observed phenomena might be explained if the object just started gushing gas as it approached perihelion. A comet of course might do that, but its weird because for so long they observed zero non-gravitational acceleration, way less than typical comets, leading Loeb to conclude it had to be absolutely massive. Then suddenly, even greater than 1.3 AU away, it starts gushing gas and is now displaying the 2nd-highest acceleration ever observed in a comet ? Loeb calculated it would have to have converted at least a sixth of its mass into gas in the past month for that to happen. So he says he's looking for an even more massive gas cloud when it appears from behind the sun. I thought it already had a massive cloud of CO2 around it so not sure what difference he'd expect to see, different gas or an even way bigger cloud.