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File:3I-ATLAS surface brightness plot.png

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English: A diagram showing the appearance of 3I/ATLAS's coma. Shown on the left panel is an image of 3I/ATLAS among background stars, taken by the Very Large Telescope on 4 July 2025. The image is annotated with the following:
  • On the bottom left corner is a scale bar showing the angular distance scale of the image, with 10 arcseconds representing the length of the horizontal line segment below.
  • On the bottom right corner are a set of perpendicular arrows indicating the directions of North and East in the sky.
  • The comet 3I/ATLAS is centered in the image, indicated and labeled by the orange crosshair.
  • On the right of 3I/ATLAS are two arrows indicating the directions toward the Sun (yellow) and toward the comet's direction of motion (red).
Shown on the right panel is a plot illustrating the surface brightness profiles of 3I/ATLAS (scattered points) vs. a reference background star (blue line). The plot shows that the surface brightness of 3I/ATLAS extends to a greater radius than the reference star (whose peak brightness is normalized to be equal to the comet's peak brightness), indicating that 3I/ATLAS has a fuzzy and extended appearance, and therefore has a coma.
Date Taken on 4 July 2025
Source Own work; the VLT image is sourced from the ESO science archive (image ID FORS2.2025-07-04T06_49_56.011) and the plot is sourced from Figure 4 of Seligman et al. (2025), which is licensed under CC-BY-4.0.
Author Nrco0e

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3I/ATLAS

inception

30 July 2025

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Date/TimeThumbnailDimensionsUserComment
current19:41, 30 July 2025Thumbnail for version as of 19:41, 30 July 20252,825 × 1,200 (652 KB)Nrco0eChange legend from "reference" to "background"
19:39, 30 July 2025Thumbnail for version as of 19:39, 30 July 20252,825 × 1,200 (652 KB)Nrco0eUploaded own work with UploadWizard

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