Isotopic evidence for a cold and distant origin of 3I/ATLAS
Martin Cordiner, Nathan X Roth, Marco Micheli, Geronimo Villanueva, Davide Farnocchia, Steven Charnley, Nicolas Biver, Dominique Bockelée-Morvan, Dennis Bodewits, Colin Orion Chandler, Jacques Crovisier, Maria N Drozdovskaya, Kenji Furuya, Michael S P Kelley, Stefanie Milam, John W Noonan, Cyrielle Opitom, Megan E Schwamb, Cristina A Thomas · 2026
Read Isotopic evidence for a cold and distant origin of 3I/ATLAS by Martin Cordiner, Nathan X Roth, Marco Micheli, Geronimo Villanueva, Davide Farnocchia, Steven Charnley, Nicolas Biver, Dominique Bockelée-Morvan, Dennis Bodewits, Colin Orion Chandler, Jacques Crovisier, Maria N Drozdovskaya, Kenji Furuya, Michael S P Kelley, Stefanie Milam, John W Noonan, Cyrielle Opitom, Megan E Schwamb, Cristina A Thomas (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13391348.txt.
Description
Martin Cordiner leads a 2026 chemical analysis of 3I/ATLAS, a comet that arrived from interstellar space. Such visitors are the only direct samples of icy bodies formed around other stars, offering a glimpse of how planet building varies across the galaxy.
Isotope measurements show the comet's water is strikingly rich in deuterium, more than ten times the level in known solar system comets, and its overall elemental mix matches no solar system body. The pattern points to formation in a very cold and distant environment around its home star. Planetary scientists gain hard evidence that other planetary systems cook their icy building blocks under conditions unlike our own.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Martin Cordiner, Nathan X Roth, Marco Micheli, Geronimo Villanueva, Davide Farnocchia, Steven Charnley, Nicolas Biver, Dominique Bockelée-Morvan, Dennis Bodewits, Colin Orion Chandler, Jacques Crovisier, Maria N Drozdovskaya, Kenji Furuya, Michael S P Kelley, Stefanie Milam, John W Noonan, Cyrielle Opitom, Megan E Schwamb, Cristina A Thomas |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 52198 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |