A Never Before Seen Rapid Brightening Of Comet 3I/ Atlas Is Occurring!

James Kaufman, World News Report Today. A never-before-seen strange rapid brightening of Comet C/2023 A3 Atlas is occurring. A rapid brightening of Comet 3I Atlas, never seen before from another comet, is currently occurring. Spacecraft monitoring the sun witnessed a dramatic surge in the brightness of Comet 3I Atlas as it plunged toward its October 29th perihelion. Laos Observatory and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory reported the phenomena in a preprint submitted to the Astro Journal Letters on October 28th. Quote, the reason for A3's rapid brightening, which far exceeds the brightening rate of any Oort cloud comet, remains unclear, if not baffling, the authors said. My guess is they turned on the engines. Of course, I'm kidding. I hope. While Earth-based telescopes lost sight of the comet during its closer approach to the sun, coronagraphs on spacecraft like Stereo-A SOHO and NOAA's GOES-19 satellite never stopped watching. The composite image shown here shows what the comets look like to these instruments. This is, on the far left, GOES-19 Core 1. They said it did the very best job of imaging the comet as it flew by. Funny how they didn't tell us it was occurring until it was off of core one, meaning out of the visual area of the spacecraft. Here we see Stereo A also watching the comet as it flew over our star. And on the bottom, we have LASCO C3. Now, I can't believe that no one saw this on C3 if it's that bright. Very, very strange. Again, NOAA's Core 1 aboard NOAA's GOES-19 coronagraph did the best job in imaging the comet showing a 4-arc-minute-wide coma or atmosphere, while SOHO's C3 coronagraph, that'd be LASCO C3, collected the best color data, revealing the comet to be blue. Bluer than the sun, the blue color hints that glowing gas, not dust, now dominates its brightness. Lowell Observatory and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory analyzed coronagraph data from September through October. Now, this doesn't make sense, but it's verbatim. They found that... 3i Atlas has been increasing in brightness as the seventh power of decreasing distance from the sun, twice as fast as it was brightening earlier this year. This might be caused by a surge in water sublimating from the comet's core, they speculated in their paper just released. Our cursory analysis of this data indicates the comet will likely emerge from solar conjunction considerably brighter than when it entered. They say, we have never seen anything like this. This bodes well for the future. Europe's JUICE spacecraft will encounter the comet for a closer look on November 2nd. Its instruments will benefit from the increased brightness. Telescopes on Earth regain the ability to image Comet 3I Atlas in late November and December when the interstellar object fully emerges from the glare of our sun. Is it about to take a hard right and head directly towards Earth? I guess only time will tell, and I guess we'll all find out sooner rather than later. God bless, folks. This one's a strange one. Please share, subscribe, and always remember, anything's possible in Bizarro World.