Fox added:
“We certainly haven’t seen any technosignatures or anything from it that would lead us to believe it was anything other than a comet.”
Still, scientists remind the public that this is no ordinary object. It is, as Fox put it, “an ancient alien comet”—formed around a different star long before our solar system existed.
Unprecedented Observations from Mars and JWST
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) captured the closest early images, photographing the comet on Oct. 2 from just 19 million miles away.
HiRISE Camera
Kshatriya explained:
“You can see comet 3I/ATLAS as a fuzzy white ball. That ball is a cloud of dust and ice called the coma.”
Meanwhile, JWST and the SPHEREx telescope revealed the comet’s chemical fingerprint using infrared light. Scientists detected abundant carbon dioxide and water ice, along with thermal signatures invisible to the human eye.
Shawn Domagal-Goldman noted:
“It’s a rare opportunity to compare ancient dust from a distant solar system to that from our own.”
