NASA's Hubble Reveals 3I/ATLAS Secret: Symmetrical Jets Defy Explanation

While the holiday season typically draws our gaze toward festive lights on the ground, a rare celestial wanderer has been making a final, mysterious bow across the sky. A visitor from the furthest reaches of the cosmos, known as 3I/ATLAS, has spent the last few months trekking through our solar system, offering astronomers a fleeting glimpse of a world beyond our own. Captured in images that initially seemed messy or overexposed, this interstellar interloper is now forcing researchers to rethink everything they thought they knew about deep-space objects.

This is no garden-variety comet. It holds the prestigious, albeit rare, title of being only the third extra-solar object ever detected by humanity, following the mysterious 'Oumuamua and the high-speed Borisov. Having journeyed from a distant point far beyond our sun's influence — believed to be from the direction of the Sagittarius constellation — it is now beginning its long trek back into the eternal 'black'.

While most of the world relied on massive observatory data to track its progress, early snapshots — once dismissed as noisy data — are now being re-evaluated as profound previews of the object's true, baffling nature.

The Geometric Enigma of the Interstellar 3I/ATLAS

When the first images of 3I/ATLAS were captured roughly two to three months ago, they barely registered outside a small circle of specialists. At first glance, the frames looked crude. However, in hindsight, these early glimpses may have been quietly screaming the truth about the object's composition.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has since provided the clarity needed to see what the early blurs hinted at: a nucleus estimated to be between 440 metres and 5.6 kilometres in diameter, shedding material in a way that defies traditional models. The images are unsettling for a simple reason: the object does not behave like a normal comet.

Instead of a clean nucleus embedded in a roughly symmetric coma, 3I/ATLAS appears dominated by a harsh, lopsided, almost bulbous glow. It is paired with a compact, offset bright knot that looks detached rather than centred. The light distribution is unbalanced and directional, looking almost purposeful. While early data is often dismissed as containing exposure artefacts, weeks of higher-resolution imaging have confirmed that this wasn't an immature view of a comet 'waking up', but an early glimpse of an object with built-in geometry.

Symmetrical Jets Deepen 3I/ATLAS Mystery

One of the most haunting features revealed in these analyses is a compact bright point sitting near the edge of the larger glow. Initially written off as a background star, follow-up astrometry suggests this brightness was co-moving with 3I/ATLAS. Today's data shows that the object's brightest emissions do not always align with the presumed centre of mass. Instead, they appear to migrate as the object rotates, consistent with persistent jet-like structures rather than random outgassing.

Hubble's high-resolution views from late 2025 revealed the object's most startling secret: three perfectly symmetrical internal jets. While one points away from the sun, the other two are oriented at precisely +/-120 degrees relative to each other—a geometric configuration that Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb and other researchers find 'hard to explain' as a purely natural occurrence.

Scientific observations have reinforced several key facts that the early images first hinted at:

• The object's activity is directional rather than uniform.
• Brightness is concentrated and offset, not diffuse and centred.
• The chemical profile, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), shows 3I/ATLAS is unusually rich in carbon dioxide while containing very little water ice — a stark contrast to the comets of our own solar system.
• The coma does not expand evenly with solar heating as expected.

As the object approaches the sun, rising temperatures cause its ices to sublimate and release gas. This outgassing introduces minor forces that produce small shifts in its path. Travelling at a staggering 153,000 miles per hour at its closest approach to the sun (perihelion) on Oct. 29, 2025, the object has officially become the fastest solar system visitor ever recorded.

Sharp images now show elongated profiles and symmetric jet groupings that fit the narrative of a structured engine caught mid-cycle. As 3I/ATLAS continues its journey back into the black, it serves as a reminder that the truth often shows itself early — long before we have the resolution or the courage to name it.