{"id":491215,"date":"2026-05-18T20:49:14","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T20:49:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/491215\/"},"modified":"2026-05-18T20:49:14","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T20:49:14","slug":"interstellar-comet-gave-scientists-their-first-taste-of-alien-water","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/491215\/","title":{"rendered":"Interstellar Comet Gave Scientists Their First Taste of Alien Water"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The Hubble Space Telescope imaged 3I\/ATLAS on 30 November 2025 when it was 286 million kilometers from Earth. Credit:\u00a0NASA, ESA, STScI, D. Jewitt (UCLA); Image Processing: J. DePasquale (STScI)<\/a>,\u00a0CC BY 4.0 INT<\/a><\/p>\n

In late 2025, astronomers spotted an interstellar comet making a quick trip through the solar system. 3I\/ATLAS was discovered in July when it was just inside Jupiter\u2019s orbit. It\u2019s now about halfway between Jupiter and Saturn and getting farther away every day.<\/p>\n

Astronomers have been observing 3I\/ATLAS throughout its journey inward toward the Sun and back out again, compiling the most comprehensive and detailed view thus far of an\u00a0interstellar object<\/a>, including the chemistry of the gases that sublimated from its surface and formed its coma and tail.<\/p>\n

In a first-of-its-kind observation of an interstellar object (ISO), researchers have discovered that the ratio of deuterium to hydrogen in 3I\/ATLAS\u2019s outgassed water is 30\u201340 times higher than in solar system objects. That suggests that the comet formed in a much colder environment than our own solar system did.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The European Space Agency\u2019s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (ESA JUICE) mission, on its way to Jupiter, imaged 3I\/ATLAS on 5 November 2025 when the comet was 64 million kilometers from the spacecraft. Credit:\u00a0ESA\/Juice\/JANUS<\/a>,\u00a0CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cIt is always hard to really pinpoint where these objects form,\u201d said\u00a0Luis E. Salazar Manzano<\/a>, the lead researcher on these observations and a doctoral student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. \u201cWe know that they were formed in different parts of the galaxy, but it\u2019s hard to connect what we measure with how they were formed. These types of measurements, such as the relative abundance of deuterium to hydrogen in water, are one of the best ways we have to actually [learn] about their forming conditions and their evolution.\u201d<\/p>\n

Coming In from the Cold<\/p>\n

Water appears to be ubiquitous throughout the universe, sprinkled within distant galaxies and in star-forming nebulae. But there are different flavors of water: heavy, semiheavy, and plain old H2O. In the molecular clouds where stars form, the cold environment favors a chemical reaction that increases the amount of gaseous deuterium (D), an isotope of hydrogen, relative to regular hydrogen atoms. That deuterium then bonds with hydrogen and oxygen atoms to create semiheavy water, or HDO.<\/p>\n

By measuring the quantity of semiheavy water relative to regular water in an object, scientists can infer the object\u2019s ratio of deuterium to hydrogen, or D\/H, and decode the physical conditions in which that water formed. Astronomers have made such measurements for baby stars, planet-forming disks, solar system comets, and meteorites, as well as Earth\u2019s ocean.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is fundamentally important about ISOs is that they are physical leftovers of the process of forming another planetary system and they can give us clues to that process,\u201d said\u00a0Karen Meech<\/a>, an astrobiologist at the University of Hawai\u02bbi at M\u0101noa who was not involved with this research.<\/p>\n

The team observed\u00a03I\/ATLAS<\/a>\u00a0with the Atacama Large Millimeter\/submillimeter Array (ALMA<\/a>) in Chile on November 2025 when the comet was 335 million kilometers (208 million miles) from Earth. It had just passed its closest approach to the Sun and was as bright as it was ever going to be. This timing was critical for the measurements the team wanted to make because the signal for HDO is very subtle, especially when it has to compete with the much more abundant H2O in the comet and within Earth\u2019s atmosphere, Salazar Manzano explained.<\/p>\n

\u00d7<\/p>\n

Thank you! One more thing…<\/p>\n

Please check your inbox and confirm your subscription.<\/p>\n

Those measurements showed that for every 1,000 hydrogen atoms in 3I\/ATLAS, there were about 5\u20137 deuterium atoms. While that\u2019s not a lot, the ratio is still at least 40 times more than what\u2019s found in ocean water and at least 30 times the average value in solar system\u00a0comets<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe conditions in the stellar system in which 3I\/ATLAS formed may have been quite different from the one in the solar system,\u201d said\u00a0Paul Hartogh<\/a>, a physicist and atmospheric science researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in G\u00f6ttingen, Germany.<\/p>\n

The first interstellar object, 1I\/\u02bbOumuamua, did not outgas any material, and although the second object, 2I\/Borisov, did, it was not bright enough to detect deuterium. 3I\/ATLAS was the first opportunity astronomers had to measure the D\/H ratio of an interstellar comet. Those measurements suggest that 3I\/ATLAS formed in a much colder galactic environment than the solar system did, less than 30\u00b0C above absolute zero. The team\u00a0published<\/a>\u00a0these results in\u00a0Nature Astronomy\u00a0in April.<\/p>\n

Planning for the Next Interstellar Visitor<\/p>\n

Hartogh, who was not involved with this research, said that on the one hand, 3I\/ATLAS\u2019s high deuterium enrichment is surprising because it is higher than that of any known comet. On the other hand, he added, some\u00a0scientists predicted<\/a>\u00a0such high values for cometary water several decades ago.<\/p>\n

Meech said she found these results \u201creally interesting.\u201d She never expected all other solar systems to have formed just like ours, and 3I\/ATLAS fits with that idea.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis gives us an intriguing look into the processes of planetary system formation\u2014and that there are differences from our own solar system,\u201d Meech said. \u201cIt is too early to tell what this implies for the formation of planets or habitable worlds. We are just at the beginning of an exciting story.\u201d<\/p>\n

3I\/ATLAS is getting\u00a0harder to see<\/a>\u00a0with telescopes, but astronomers still have a lot of data from when it was much brighter to go through, Salazar Manzano said. Teams around the world are working on creating a holistic picture of the comet\u2019s chemistry and evolution.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, \u201cthe fact that we were able to make this measurement with 3I will allow us to better prepare what to expect with the next generation of interstellar objects,\u201d Salazar Manzano said.<\/p>\n

Scientists expect that the\u00a0Vera C. Rubin Observatory<\/a>\u00a0could discover between\u00a06 and 51 interstellar objects<\/a>\u00a0within the next 10 years. If objects are detected early enough in their journey through the solar system, \u201cthere may be enough time to coordinate observations with ground-based and spaceborne telescopes, taking advantage of the recent experience gained by the multiple 3I\/ATLAS observations,\u201d Hartogh said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are rare opportunities to study another planetary nursery up close, and we have to take advantage of each new ISO to learn as much as we can,\u201d Meech said. \u201cIt may be harder for a large number of individual teams to get all the data they want, so I think coordination and collaboration is needed more than ever.\u201d<\/p>\n

This article originally appeared in EOS Magazine<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Hubble Space Telescope imaged 3I\/ATLAS on 30 November 2025 when it was 286 million kilometers from Earth.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":491216,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[77],"tags":[10866,7043,18,19,10881,17,133],"class_list":["post-491215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-3i-atlas","tag-comet","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-interstellar-comet","tag-ireland","tag-science"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116597553706031939","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=491215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491215\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/491216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=491215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=491215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=491215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}