Overview
- Breakthrough Listen pointed the 100‑meter Green Bank Telescope at 3I/ATLAS on December 18, a day before perigee, to search across multiple radio bands for narrowband technosignatures.
- The team winnowed roughly 470,000 initial candidates to nine using ABACAD on‑off checks, then identified all as human radio interference, and other groups also reported null results at different frequencies.
- SOHO’s SWAN instrument measured vigorous post‑perihelion water outgassing, peaking near 3.17 × 10^29 molecules per second on November 6 and declining steadily through early December as the object receded from the Sun.
- Hubble images showed evolving, symmetric jet features that drew scrutiny, yet most investigators interpret them as natural gas‑and‑dust outflows from a dust‑rich cometary nucleus.
- As only the third confirmed interstellar object, 3I/ATLAS has been tracked by a coordinated, multi‑facility campaign that is yielding a deep dataset for ongoing analysis as it departs the inner Solar System.