New image shows 3I/ATLAS surrounded by a faint haze but missing its cometary tail

New images of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, which were taken on November 5, 2025, have recently been made public. 

The images were taken by the Lowell Discovery Telescope in Arizona when 3I/ATLAS was “at a distance of 1.38 au from the Sun and a distance of 2.23 au from Earth.”

Researcher Qicheng Zhang was one of the experts who captured the images of the interstellar object.

According to cometary.org, the image showed the interstellar object’s “greenish C₂ (diatomic carbon) emission, which had been enhanced with a narrowband filter isolating that emission.”

On November 7, 2025, Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb wrote about the new image of 3I/ATLAS in a Medium blog post. 

He pointed out that, as per the newly released photo, 3I/ATLAS appears to be a “bright ball of light, comparable in size to the point-spread-function that defines the resolution of the telescope.”

He further mentioned that the interstellar object has a “faint glow around it,” which can be compared to a coma or an atmosphere; however, there was no “clear evidence for a cometary tail.”

“The atmosphere was viewed with a green filter, optimized to detect diatomic carbon molecules (C2). It is brightest in the bluest filter,” he wrote. 

Harvard scientist Avi Loeb weighs in on 3I/ATLAS’s missing cometary tail

In the Medium post, Loeb noted that the new image did not provide any evidence “for a dust tail pointing away from the sun,” a feature that would ordinarily result from an intense evaporation as a comet near perihelion. 

“This is surprising in view of NASA’s JPL report of a non-gravitational acceleration for 3I/ATLAS,” he wrote. 

According to Loeb, based on momentum conservation, 3I/ATLAS should lose over 13% of its mass during perihelion if it is a comet of natural origin. 

Consequently, with the mass loss, a “massive coma” should have developed, comprised of dust and gas. It would have been pushed by the solar radiation pressure and the solar wind into resembling a typical cometary tail, pointing away from the sun. 

“The caveat is that this image was taken when 3I/ATLAS was only about 13 degrees away from the Sun in the sky. If the cometary tail is pointing away from the Sun, we are looking at it from an unfavorable perspective of being nearly head on,” Loeb wrote. 

However, he pointed out that the perspective was the same when the Hubble Space Telescope imaged the interstellar object’s “anti-tail from 3I/ATLAS toward the sun.”

The Harvard astrophysicist further noted that the angle between 3I/ATLAS and the sun will continue to increase in the coming weeks, allowing “terrestrial observers to infer with confidence whether 3I/ATLAS has a cometary tail after perihelion.”

According to Space.com, Qicheng Zhang, a postdoctoral fellow at Lowell Observatory and one of the scientists behind the latest image of the interstellar object, said that they had no evidence for the “gas coma changing colors.”

Zhang explained that their result showed only a possible “gas coma” around 3I/ATLAS, which is likely adding to the overall brightness of the object.

“As far as we know, the comet just 'changed color' once when its gas coma first became visible/bright, and it's still like that now (only brighter),” Zhang added.

That said, researchers and space enthusiasts continue to await NASA’s release of the high-resolution HiRISE images obtained on October 2-3, 2025. 

Stay tuned for more updates.