Overview
- The object reached its minimum distance on December 19 at about 269 million kilometers from Earth, far beyond any influence on the planet.
- It is not visible to the naked eye and can only be observed with powerful professional telescopes or space observatories such as JWST and Hubble.
- Researchers say 3I/ATLAS behaves like a comet with outgassing that explains its non‑Keplerian motion, and observations indicate an unusual, CO2‑dominated (dry‑ice) composition.
- Trajectory forecasts show a distant pass by Jupiter in March 2026—over 50 million kilometers from the planet—after which it will head out of the Solar System.
- Harvard’s Avi Loeb reported a 14th observational anomaly and urged preparedness for a rare ‘black swan’ event, while Russian scientific bodies deem an artificial origin very unlikely and President Vladimir Putin called the object harmless and joked about “sending it to Jupiter.”