It's Alarming: What We Just Found about 3I-ATLAS – And What It Really Is?

A new interstellar visitor, 3I/ATLAS, is puzzling scientists the more they study it. Racing through our Solar System at nearly 61 km/s, it’s now well inside Jupiter’s orbit and will make its closest pass to the Sun in October 2025. But here’s where it gets strange—this object isn’t behaving like any ordinary comet.

When researchers used the Very Large Telescope in Chile, they detected nickel gas without iron, which is extremely unusual. Normally, these two elements appear together in cosmic dust. Even more curious, as 3I/ATLAS moved closer to the Sun, the levels of nickel and cyanide spiked far more sharply than expected. This doesn’t fit the normal “ice sublimation” model of comets.