A new telescope photograph shows the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS blasting a jet towards the sun.

As our nearest star warms up a portion of the comet's surface, 3I/ATLAS is launching a jet of material in the direction of the sun. The composite image displays a white light, which is the comet's atmosphere or coma, and the nucleus, or frozen, rocky centre core, of 3I/ATLAS as a big, black dot. The purple-marked jet is blazing out in the direction of the sun, which is also how comets in the solar system often behave.

The third known interstellar object to pass through our solar system, 3I/ATLAS, is speeding towards the sun in preparation for its closest approach on October 30. Before vanishing once more into the night, the comet will pass within 1.8 astronomical units (sun-Earth distances) of our planet, making it visible through modest telescopes.

The Astronomer's Telegram, an announcement service for the astronomy community, with editor-in-chief Robert Rutledge, an associate professor at McGill University in Montreal, informed astronomers about the jet on October 15.

The jet's footage, which was taken on August 2, consists of 159 exposures of 50 seconds each. It was captured using the Teide Observatory's Two-meter Twin Telescope in Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands.

"This is the usual," astrophysicist and chief science officer Miquel Serra-Ricart, who co-manages Teide at the private research organisation Light Bridges, told our sister site LiveScience via email. The fresh photos, which have not yet undergone peer review, were uploaded by Serra-Ricart, who noted that the comet's tail is pointing away from the sun, which is common for these icy comets.

Comets do warm up as they approach the sun, but not all of their locations warm up in the same way. These sun-facing jets are caused by sublimated gases that can break through a weaker spot on the comet's surface, when the portions facing the sun heat up the fastest.

According to Serra-Ricart, the jet may be up to 6,200 miles (10,000 km) away from the surface of 3I/ATLAS, more than twice as far away as the same distance would be across the majority of the US. The stream is probably composed of dust and carbon dioxide particles, similar to what NASA's James Webb Space Telescope observed in August.

As the comet's nucleus spins, these jets may start to spread out. After being forced there by pressure from the sun, known as the solar wind, some of the material will remain in the coma, while the remainder will fall into the comet's tail. In 2020, Hubble Space Telescope photos of the solar system comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE, which was visible to the unaided eye, displayed precisely that type of behaviour.

What is the operation of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)?

Like all telescopes, the JWST's primary function is to gather light and concentrate it so that we can view farther into the sky. However, there are numerous distinctions, such as the fact that JWST perceives the electromagnetic spectrum in a different region than our eyes do. Similar to a night vision security camera, JWST perceives infrared or "heat" while we see visible light. Additionally, because of its size, it can see farther, smaller, and colder objects because it can capture a lot more light. Being in space also helps with this since it avoids having to gaze through the atmosphere, which obscures a lot of fascinating and helpful information.

What is the "see" range of the James Webb Space Telescope?

Why is it that galaxies in the early universe are visible to the JWST due to this remote view? Things move away from us more quickly the farther they are in the universe. Redshift is a phenomenon experienced by fast objects that causes them to look redder. When something is that far away, it eventually turns infrared, which is even redder than red. Because of this, JWST has a greater field of view than any previous telescope.

The oldest objects are also the ones that are farthest away since light takes time to reach us. Hubble and JWST are examples of telescopes that view back in time. Because JWST is in the infrared, it can see farther than Hubble, reaching nearly to the universe's birth 13.7 billion years ago.

The James Webb Space Telescope is currently where?

The L2 Lagrange point is a location in space that the JWST circles. To avoid the heat from Earth interfering with its view, this is 1.5 million km away from us. We can need less fuel to maintain L2 than if it were simply floating at any random place in space since it is a gravity well. The fact that L2 tracks us around the sun is particularly helpful since it allows us to download images from the telescope and communicate at all times.