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fliptop [soylentnews.org] writes:

A new analysis of our solar system’s interstellar interloper, 3I/ATLAS [futurism.com], reveals that it’s spewing huge amounts of water — and astronomers can’t immediately explain why [futurism.com]:

The object, which is widely believed to be comet, showed strong ultraviolet emissions that are unmistakable telltales of hydroxyl gas (OH), a byproduct of water, when astronomers imaged it with NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift space telescope before it disappeared behind the Sun. The emissions could only be spotted from space because the ultraviolet light would get absorbed in the atmosphere.

Their findings, detailed in a new study [iop.org] published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, argue that the presence of all this OH indicates the comet is ejecting water vapor at a torrential rate of about 88 pounds per second — around the same rate as a fire hose running at full blast, according to a press release about the findings.

[...] Astronomers believe that 3I/ATLAS came from the center of the Milky Way, where it was likely booted out of its original star system by a gravitational disturbance like the close flyby of another star, braving interstellar space before eventually cruising through our solar neighborhood. Based on these inferences, astronomers estimated that the comet must be billions of years old, perhaps three billion years older than the Sun itself. It’s not only a snapshot of a different part of the galaxy, but a different era of the cosmos altogether.

Previously: Does 3I/ATLAS Generate its Own Light? [soylentnews.org]

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