The numbers don’t just challenge comet theory — they expose a mass-loss process no one is publicly grappling with.
The dust is heavier than expected.
The loss is quieter than predicted.
And the pattern refuses to break.
[USA HERALD] – The most recent images of 3I/ATLAS taken from Tenerife, Spain — using the Transient Survey Telescope and the Two-Meter Twin Telescope — do more than confirm that this interstellar object is shedding material. They reveal that it is doing so with a level of precision, restraint, and internal consistency that standard comet models were never designed to explain.
At first glance, the numbers appear unremarkable. Roughly ten million kilograms of dust, released over about a month. A modest dust production rate of roughly three kilograms per second. Gas still dominates the mass loss. Nothing explosive. Nothing catastrophic. But that is exactly where the anomaly lies. Natural cometary mass loss, especially near perihelion, is messy. It spikes, collapses, stutters, and flares. What the Tenerife data show instead is a controlled, sustained release — a slow hemorrhage rather than a violent rupture.
