NASA won’t release the high definition pictures. Their excuses? The government is shut down.
I trust our government as far as I can throw it. These series of interstellar visitors are really terrible interesting. I love the fact that we know next to nothing about them. That’s the only way you learn. Pity we don’t have probes lying around to shoot at them.
Oh yeah, *they* don’t want us to know the *truth*, such as the pictures from every non-US source.
Images taken before the official discovery indicate it is 12-14 miles in diameter and is more likely an asteroid than a comet.
Two news reports: one from August 24th and the other from May/June.
August 24th
Modern Keck Twin 2 10 meter telescope in Hawaii took these images [ it made the first direct image of a planetary system in orbit around another star.
Images of 3I taken on Aug 24 2025 - at a distance of 2.5-2.6AU. Hubble took an image a month before this if the object, KCWI with wavelength range of .3425 to 0.55 micrometers to get a spectrographic analysis of what king of materials are in the coma. The anti-tail is still present in the Keck image a month after the Hubble image
The authors reasoned that the nickel tetracarbonyl took place naturally, but no explanation on how. The ratio of nickel to cyanide showed a central concentration of nickel relative to cyanide, indicating a possible direct relationship between the two. Cyanide is related to living organisms, while nickel is treated to industrial processes. Why is that found here?
The Keck detected the plume of nickel out to an exponential radius of 600 km and 849 km for cyanide. They found the trace loss mass for 3.9 grams/sec cyanide and 0.9 grams/sec for nickel. This shows how precise the Keck is to detect that little metal escaping form an object thousands of kilometers away out of a total mass loss of 150 kilograms/sec: 87% of CO2, 9% of CO, and 4% H2O.
Recently before 3I disappeared behind the Sun, a huge gush of water was emitted, but the gush had no effect on 3I’s speed or trajectory. A never before seen action by any comet ever. Meanwhile, the coma remains in front of the object, even though the sun and solar wind are quite active recently, and despite being hit by a CME.
May/June 2025
In the research notes of a separate study of the American Astronomical Society, stated that in the data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite TESS observatory on May/June 2025 observations. More than 9,000 TESS images where analyzed by stacking them into composite frames to search for any signs of a coma.
Why they found was that 3I’s profile was almost identical to four different ASTROIDS with no coma detected. 3I’s profile is slightly below the 4 astroids’ profile, but still remained bright, indicating it might be 12-14 km in diameter. The team suggested the material being ejected was as low as 10 meters/second which would account for the forward facing coma. This is a reach, but they are trying to find some sort of explanation for the absence of a coma.
But all in all, the object more closely resembles the 4 astroids, but not a comet.
We should wait for more information before declaring it a comet when it has so many un-comet like features. If it is an interstellar astroid, why not call it that? What is the fixation on calling it a comet, when it does not look like a comet?
The Juno probe stands the best chance of getting a detailed look at the object. Perhaps the most unscientific thing anyone an do is to leap to conclusions before getting more detailed information.
References on request.