From the Galactic Core Toward Earth 3I/ATLAS Traces Its Origin to Sagittarius

This matters because objects ejected from such regions are subjected to forces most solar system bodies never experience. Close stellar flybys, shock waves from supernovae, intense ultraviolet radiation, and gravitational interactions with massive stars can fracture, heat, spin up, or chemically alter small bodies before they are ever expelled into interstellar space. When I compare that reality with the growing body of observational data on 3I/ATLAS—its persistent sunward anti-tail, asymmetric jet behavior, unusual dust grain distribution, and non-standard acceleration signatures—the connection becomes impossible to ignore. These are precisely the kinds of features one might expect from an object that has lived a hard life near the galactic core.

Researchers including Avi Loeb have repeatedly emphasized that interstellar objects are not guaranteed to resemble comets or asteroids formed in calmer regions like our own Kuiper Belt or Oort Cloud. NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory have similarly noted that origin context is critical when interpreting anomalous behavior. An object arriving from the Sagittarius direction is statistically more likely to have endured extreme environmental processing, which can explain why standard comet models struggle to fully account for what we are seeing in 3I/ATLAS.