3I/ATLAS shows perihelion burst and radial-only non-gravitational acceleration

https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1oqfau8/3iatlas_shows_perihelion_burst_and_radialonly/

47 14 9 months ago

old.reddit.com

HPsquared2• 9 months ago

Solar heating and outgassing on the side facing the sun.

yodon• 9 months ago

For the layman: These plots show a sudden burst of acceleration on the object, and the push points mostly in one steady direction within the orbital plane. A normal comet warms up and ramps its outgassing gradually, and breaking apart would look chaotic with the direction of thrust changing randomly.
Here we see one short, powerful jet, like a sealed pocket finally venting, so the speed jumps sharply while the path stays in the same plane; it accelerates but it surprisingly doesn’t change direction.
It resembles what a single thruster would do (what an incredible prospect!), but it can technically still be explained by a natural rupture of volatile ices in an ancient space rock.

tummler• 9 months ago

Seems odd to me that there would be one short, powerful jet of a natural explanation. Why hasn’t this thing been outgassing like crazy the whole time?

aaroninsf2• 9 months ago

Current speculation is that it's a novel object type, unlike the conglomerate iceballs we call "comets," with a different origin and history.

Unfortunately we did not make the heroic effort it would have taken to get a close look, so as with 1I/ʻOUMUAMUA we'll be left with enigmas and uncertainty.

Unless of course it brakes hard into a parking orbit. :)

HPsquared2• 9 months ago

Maybe it was cooking away like a sealed food container in a microwave, internal pressure building, then the seal is breached and the internal pressure is released in a single event.

boothby• 9 months ago

Breathless speculation aside, I think it would be extremely cool if we could identify, intercept and sample an extrasolar object at some point in my lifetime.

CamperBob2• 9 months ago

Meanwhile, in this life, some dogs and cats were apparently being eaten, so we get this: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/nasa-is-sinking-its-...

Muromec• 9 months ago

That just means that the first people making contact with the object will not be speaking English, not that it will not happen at all

m4rtink• 9 months ago

By this point it looks like they are not that rare. Lets just hope the next one does not have enough delta-v to change its trajectory to intercept us - at a couple dozen km/s. ;-)

ProllyInfamous• 9 months ago

The most amazing thing to me (after reading Wikipedia on this very-recent classification of "Interstellar Object"), is that only two prior have been confirmed, and all in the last decade.

ojosilva• 9 months ago

For the fans of the genre, some more speculation by the master speculator himself:

https://avi-loeb.medium.com/post-perihelion-data-on-3i-atlas...

3I/ATLAS shows perihelion burst and radial-only non-gravitational acceleration

Related Stories