interstellar Comet 3i/Atlas: A 10-Million-Year Journey through the Milky Way Yields Few Clues to its Origins
By rachel Kim, World-Today-News.com – october 26, 2024
The interstellar comet 3i/atlas continues to captivate the scientific community, prompting intensive study with the most powerful telescopes available. Now, a new study leveraging data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) GAIA probe is offering a fascinating, though ultimately inconclusive, look at the comet’s trajectory – stretching back an astounding 10 million years.
The GAIA mission, completed in January after an extended run since 2022, meticulously charted the positions, brightness, and movements of billions of stars within our Milky Way galaxy. This unprecedented dataset has allowed a team of Spanish and Swedish researchers to attempt a remarkable feat: reconstructing the comet’s path through the galaxy, searching for gravitational interactions that might have altered its course.
The core question driving this research is simple: where did 3i/Atlas come from? Understanding its origin could provide valuable insights into the formation and evolution of planetary systems beyond our own.
Rewinding Time: A 10-Million-Year Simulation
The team, led by Xabier Pérez Couto of the universidade da Coruña, used GAIA data to simulate the comet’s movement backward in time, seeking close encounters with stars that could have subtly shifted its trajectory. The simulation extended a staggering 10 million years into the past – a timeframe rarely attempted in such studies.
The results, published on Arxiv ([[[[