Let us beg a question or two. 3I/ATLAS has a persistent antotail which appears to be physical. It is not going away either. At the same time ,the closest approach to the sun is inside the orbit of Mars - just.
so just why does none of our inner planets and smaller objects in the Astetroid belt have such an antitail. And just what does the sun have to do with any and all apparent outgassing shown by comets? Our scientific universe is full of untestible ideas accepted only because their creators are dead and are not about to call for caution.
everything we know about Solar comets argue for Newtonian assembages drawing in an unconsolidated mass of frozen volitiles in particular. It is completely reaonable that this object will be accompanied by a cloud of unconsolidated material and that incresasing heat as the sun is approached will alter this cloud. 3I/Atlas is not close enough for any of this. Yet i do posit that a comet running close enough to break up will also have a massive breakdown of hydrocarbons producing elemental carbon as we observe with the comet impactor of 12900 BP or the Pleistocene nonconformity.
And what is non gravitatinal acceleration? goodbye Newton and hello my cloud cosmology. My quick theory fix is to allow intelligent adjustment of contained DARK MATTER to the outside of the object itself in whole or in part, sufficient to adjust the kinetic enegy of the object and also able to entrain particles ahead of the object.
As I gave already posted, this capability would allow interstellar transits outside of the solar globe at velocities approaching a meaningful fraction of lightspeed. Again, bigger is better and mayalso allow terraforming of Venus if big enough.
Again all this is plausible if your mind can accept that our material experience is a wave guide like device for DARK MATTER which i suspect consists of neutron pairs which are inherently neutral. Trust me when i say this works and represents a lifetime working with conforming evidence, any piece of which looks crazy time.
3I/ATLAS Still Shows an Anti-Tail, as it Gets Closer to Earth
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An image of 3I/ATLAS, taken on December 13, 2025 at 21:30:26 UTC with a 0.26-meter telescope in Rayong, Thailand. The field of view spans 0.72 million kilometers on a side at the distance of 3I/ATLAS from Earth, 271 million kilometers. The bottom three panels show the projected brightness map in false colors and black & white, respectively. The top panel shows a rotational-gradient brightness map with a Larson-Sekanina filter. A prominent anti-tail, uncommon for comets, points in the direction of the Sun towards the lower left. (Image Credit: Teerasak Thaluang)
As of today, December 14, 2025, the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS is at a distance of about 270.5 million kilometers from Earth. Its images are delayed by a quarter of an hour, as it takes light from 3I/ATLAS 15 minutes to reach us. On December 19, 2025, 3I/ATLAS will get closest to Earth at a perigee distance of 269.9097 (+/-0.0060) million kilometers.
The latest image of 3I/ATLAS was taken by Teerasak Thaluang on December 13, 2025 at 21:30:26 UTC with a 0.26-meter telescope in Rayong, Thailand (as reported here). The rotational-gradient brightness map shows a prominent anti-tail, uncommon for comets, pointing in the direction of the Sun.
Whereas an anti-tail had been seen for solar system comets as a temporary perspective effect when the Earth crossed the comets’ orbital plane, this is clearly not the case with 3I/ATLAS. The anti-tail was apparent in the first Hubble Space Telescope image, taken on July 21, 2025, when 3I/ATLAS was approaching the Sun from a geocentric distance of 2.98 times the Earth-Sun separation (AU) — as reported here and analyzed here, and was also apparent in the second Hubble image taken on November 30, 2025, when 3I/ATLAS was receding away from the Sun at a distance of 1.91 AU from Earth — as reported here. The anti-tail was also apparent in thousands of images taken in between these dates.
The anti-tail of 3I/ATLAS is therefore not a perspective effect. It is a real physical jet, with a glow extending from 3I/ATLAS towards the Sun. Its nature is a mystery because gas and micrometer-dust particles are expected to be pushed away from the Sun by solar radiation pressure and the solar wind, creating the appearance of a tail — as routinely seen in solar-system comets. There was no mention of this mystery at the NASA press conference about 3I/ATLAS on November 19, 2025 (accessible here).
To explain the physics of the anti-tail of 3I/ATLAS, I have written three scientific papers. The first two of these peer-reviewed papers, co-authored with Eric Keto (accessible here and here), associate the anti-tail with scattering of sunlight by fragments of ice shed from the sun-facing side of 3I/ATLAS. These tiny ice particles evaporate before they get pushed back significantly by the solar radiation pressure and so they never appear as a conventional cometary tail. The third (single-authored) paper, published on December 8, 2025 here, associates the anti-tail with a swarm of objects that lag behind 3I/ATLAS because of its non-gravitational acceleration away from the Sun (as reported by JPL Horizons here). Analysis of the latest Hubble image could potentially favor one of these explanations.
By recognizing anomalies, we can learn something new. By ignoring them, we remain ignorant.
3I/ATLAS will reach its closest point to the Sun around Oct. 30, 2025, at a distance of about 1.4 au (130 million miles, or 210 million kilometers) — just inside the orbit of Mars. The interstellar comet's size and physical properties are being investigated by astronomers around the world.
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