The anti-tail of 3I/Atlas

The image below was released on October 15 by the Twin Two-Meter Telescope (TTT), which includes two pairs of 0.8 m telescopes from the Teid Observatory in the Canary Islands, Spain. The image is composed of 159 exposures of 50 seconds each, it was taken on August 2, 2025 and in it you can see a jet that extends a projected distance of about 6,000 km from the core of 3I/Atlas.

That black dot is not the core, it is the bubble that surrounds 3I/Atlas, we do not have any real image of what 3I/Atlas is like, we do not have a real image of what the solid core of 3I/Atlas is like, it is suspected from previous studies that the core is very dense and that it must be about 5 km in diameter, but from the first moment it was discovered it was already surrounded by a cloud of gas and dust. And in fact a cloud of gas and dust that was larger than the diameter of the Earth.

How is it possible for a 6,000 km jet to emerge that is the antitail, the presence of an antitail is not a physical anomaly, but rather a confirmation that the comet is releasing large dust particles that are spreading throughout its orbit and that from our relative position we can see that projection as an antitail.

The question of whether it is anomalous or not, although astronomers are saying that it is a normal comet, they have to recognize that it is quite rare for a comet, yes, even if we assume that it is a comet and that it is rare, comets can do this, the answer is yes and in fact it is quite common, examples of antitails, the comet Arend Roland in 1956, perhaps the most famous because it was a spectacular and very well defined antitail.

Another example was Comet Hollywood, the sadly famous Comet Hollywood, also had an anti-tail, I mention sadly because the Hollywood Comet of 1997 was also associated with the rumor that it had a spaceship behind it and the Gate of Heaven sect spread that rumor and caused the suicide of about 39 people from that sect who believed that when they died they could go with their spirits to that spaceship and travel to a wonderful planet where they would be happy and eat partridges, for Unfortunately, it wasn't like that from the start because there was no spacecraft behind Comet Hollywood.

Another example was the comet Lulin C/2007, and the photo is much clearer than the other one from 1950, it has the tail to the right of the image, the normal tail and then the antitail that would be in front, this comet showed a quite spectacular antitail, the calculation is that it reached 1 million kilometers, not 6,000 km like 3I/Atlas, but 1 million kilometers, the antitail can vary because it varies a lot depending on the visual angle from where We may be looking at it from Earth depending on the comet's orbit and the angle it has, but it was quite spectacular, so it is normal.

It is also quite logical that comets create jets that expel material, be it dust, gas, whatever, from the area that is precisely receiving the greatest amount of heat from the sun, its marching front, it is quite normal. The detail, this image from 3I/Atlas was on August 8, not when it was closest to the sun, but when it was about 247 million kilometers from the sun.

At that distance, the solar wind, which is what pushes the tails, which causes the tails to be behind, extend behind the comet as it moves. It is quite weak, it is not as strong as when it will be closest to the sun, which will be at its perihelion on October 29, at that time it was 247 million kilometers from the sun.

In short, the anti-tail is normal, and the jets that arise from comets, those explosions they have, can alter the speed and trajectory a little, not much, but enough to be able to capture it, however, at 3I/Atlas it is as if it were a locomotive, it is something that also caught attention. Yes, it is also another real anomaly, it has not suffered alterations in its trajectory and it is expelling material.

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