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A post-perihelion image of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS taken by the Wide Field Camera 3 onboard the Hubble Space Telescope on November 30, 2025. At that time, 3I/ATLAS was 286 million kilometers from Earth. Background stars appear as streaks of light. The glowing halo (coma) has a teardrop shape with an anti-tail elongated towards the Sun. The sunward direction is pointing towards the lower left, as marked by the yellow arrow. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, D. Jewitt (UCLA), M.-T. Hui (Shanghai Astronomical Observatory). Image Processing: J. DePasquale (STScI).

The interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS was reobserved by the Hubble Space Telescope from a distance of 286 million kilometers on November 30, 2025, a month after its closest approach to the Sun (perihelion). The image shows a teardrop-shaped glowing halo that extends towards the Sun. This sunward anti-tail extension was also apparent in the pre-perihelion Hubble image of 3I/ATLAS, taken on July 21, 2025, as 3I/ATLAS was approaching the Sun from a distance that is 56% larger from Earth. The new radius of the glow is about 40,000 kilometers and its anti-tail extension goes out to about 60,000 kilometers.

In a recent paper, accessible here, I suggested that the teardrop of the coma in post-perihelion images of 3I/ATLAS is associated with a large number of macroscopic non-volatile objects that separated from it as a result of its measured non-gravitational acceleration away from the Sun. My paper predicted that by November 30th, the swarm of objects would be closer to the Sun than 3I/ATLAS by about 60,000 kilometers if the objects overlapped with 3I/ATLAS at perihelion. This separation is in perfect agreement with the anti-tail extension of the teardrop shape in the new Hubble image.

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A pre-perihelion image of 3I/ATLAS by the Hubble Space Telescope on July 21, 2025. The brightness contours feature an elongation of scattered sunlight towards the Sun and not away from it, as commonly observed for solar system comets. The yellow and green arrows mark, respectively, the projected negative heliocentric velocity vector and the projected anti-solar direction. The angular scale bar of 4” corresponds to 8,650 kilometers at 3I/ATLAS’ distance of 2.98 times the Earth-Sun separation. (Credit: Jewitt et al. 2025)

We are awaiting the release of the full Hubble data set which includes ultraviolet spectroscopy to determine the composition of the gas plume around 3I/ATLAS.

In the meantime, amateur astronomers continue to provide magnificent large-scale images that extend out to millions of kilometers around 3I/ATLAS.

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An image of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, taken at 1:39 on December 2, 2025 by a 12-inch telescope in Farm Tivoli, Namibia with exposures lasting 20,6,6 and 6 minutes. North is up. The sunward direction is pointing to the lower left. The field of view is 75 by 110 arcminutes corresponding to 6.1 by 9 million kilometers at the distance of 280 million kilometers between 3I/ATLAS and Earth on that date. (Image credit: Gerald Rhemann and Michael Jäger, posted here)

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Addendum: The AI Nemesis of Scientific Information

Imagine creating videos that feature avatars of scientists that look like them and speak in their voice, but spread counterfactual information about 3I/ATLAS. How would the public know who to believe?

This is not a plot from a science fiction novel but the reality we face today. Over the past two weeks, I received hundreds of emails from fans who noticed a YouTube channel named after me, accessible here, with fake videos about the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, created by artificial intelligence (AI), that spread false content that contradicts my written essays on https://avi-loeb.medium.com/

It was obvious to my fans that the videos were fake because the clock in the background was frozen on a specific time and because two weeks ago — I injured my face on a trip to a podcast interview in Florida — whereas the fake videos did not show any sign of the injury. Nevertheless, a news outlet included one of these videos in a report about my research on 3I/ATLAS, blending reality with fake content when reporting about science.

In using AI to generate fake videos impersonating me, this YouTube channel violates several aspects of YouTube’s community guidelines and Terms of Service which should be the basis for YouTube to remove the channel. I hold the entity that created the fake videos legally liable to defamation and false content. By now, my fans and I filed dozens of reports to YouTube but the company did not take responsibility to fix this matter.

We are living in a new reality where fake content can be easily generated by AI. This raises a serious problem of how to authenticate the validity of information on the internet. Science focuses on figuring out the physical reality based on facts. The nemesis of science is fake content created by AI. For our civilization to prosper and advance scientifically, we must develop tools that distinguish fact-based scientific content from hallucinated content spread by AI avatars.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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(Image Credit: Chris Michel, National Academy of Sciences, 2023)

Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.

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