The Triple-Jet Mystery of 3I/ATLAS Is Forcing Scientists To Rethink ‘Normal’ Comets

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What the Images Actually Show—and What They Don’t

It is critical to be precise.

These are not galactic jets, not active galactic nuclei, and not plasma streams spanning light-years. The jets extend tens of thousands of kilometers—large on a solar-system scale, but entirely consistent with cometary distances.

The colorized imagery does not represent literal temperature gradients or exotic ionization states. Instead, the colors are false-color intensity mappings, commonly used in comet science to emphasize dust density, gas flow, and scattering behavior. They help researchers see structure—not heat.

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That said, the structure they reveal is genuinely unusual.

Confirmed Three-Dimensional Geometry

Advanced processing techniques—removing background noise, cosmic-ray artifacts, and sensor grain—allow astronomers to isolate the jets more clearly. The refinements reveal something important: the jets occupy different depths in space.

One jet appears partially receding from the observer, another lies closer to the plane of the sky, and a third tilts slightly sunward. This confirms the configuration is three-dimensional, not a flat optical illusion caused by perspective or image stacking.

In other words, this is not a trick of the camera.