{"id":530994,"date":"2026-07-03T11:25:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-03T11:25:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/530994\/"},"modified":"2026-07-03T11:25:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-03T11:25:10","slug":"3i-atlass-alien-chemistry-sheds-light-on-cosmic-noon-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/530994\/","title":{"rendered":"3I\/Atlas’s Alien Chemistry Sheds Light on Cosmic Noon Era"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last year, an interstellar traveler entered our Solar System. Some speculated that it was an alien spacecraft<\/a>, but it turned out to be a comet, 3I\/Atlas<\/a>, and provoked interest from astronomers and astrophysicists eager for insights into galaxies far, far away.<\/p>\n

Detailed observations from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) shot down the alien spacecraft idea, but recent NASA analysis holds clues about the comet\u2019s ancient and, literally, alien origins.<\/p>\n

With its powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), NASA was able to capture detailed data<\/a> on the interstellar traveler, including its chemical composition. The findings are akin to \u201calien chemistry\u201d for an object that was likely formed 10 to 12 billion years ago in a still mysterious period known as the universe\u2019s \u201ccosmic noon,\u201d said Jacqueline McCleary<\/a>, an assistant professor of physics at Northeastern University.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThis clearly did not originate within our cosmic gene pool,\u201d McCleary said. \u201cThis is sort of like gene sequencing a rose and then finding a fern. The building blocks are the same, but a lot has changed in the last few billion years to go from fern to rose.\u201d<\/p>\n

The most surprising discovery NASA made concerns 3I\/Atlas\u2019 chemical composition.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The comet has about 30 times the amount of deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen with double the mass of standard hydrogen, that is found in comets from our solar system, according to NASA. This chemical makeup is indicative of an intensely cold system, McCleary said.<\/p>\n

While the presence of one isotope might not sound notable, it\u2019s enough to provide a glimpse of \u201ca very different environment than our own solar system,\u201d McCleary said.<\/p>\n

\"JacquelineThe interstellar comet 3I\/Atlas \u201cclearly did not originate in our cosmic gene pool,\u201d said Jacqueline McCleary, an assistant professor of physics at Northeastern University. Photo by Matthew Modoono\/Northeastern University<\/p>\n

For instance, the \u201cheavy water\u201d ice on the comet, composed of oxygen and deuterium instead of oxygen and hydrogen, points to a lack of long-term warmth in 3I\/Atlas\u2019 home system that would typically reprocess all that material into the standard water found on Earth, she explained.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Combined with the trace amounts of carbon-13, a carbon isotope, detected in 3I\/Atlas, it further marks the comet as an ancient interstellar object. As generations of stars form and die, they leave behind more and more heavy metals, like carbon-13, McCleary explained. The more of these metals a solar system has, the more recently it formed, she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact that this comet seems to come from a system that\u2019s extremely metal-poor suggests that it has to have formed before many cycles of star formation and star death,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

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Our solar system formed around 4.5 billion years ago, relatively recent in terms of cosmic time.\u00a0 But NASA estimates that 3I\/Atlas could have formed 10 to 12 billion years ago during a time in the universe\u2019s history known as \u201ccosmic noon.\u201d<\/p>\n

This period 2 to 3 billion years after the Big Bang was the peak of star formation in the universe. It\u2019s called cosmic noon because the sheer number of new, extremely hot stars made \u201cthe universe about as bright as it\u2019s going to get,\u201d McCleary said.<\/p>\n

This period of cosmic history has become less of a question mark in recent years, thanks to powerful tools like JWST. But there is still a lot that remains unknown. How did the first galaxies, let alone planets, form? And why is the universe not making any new galaxies?<\/p>\n

Investigating 3I\/Atlas and the conditions of its home system starts to shed light on how solar systems formed during this pivotal time in the universe, McCleary said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe closer you look, the more you realize how much we don\u2019t actually really know,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

All of this new information about the comet\u2019s ancient origins and interstellar chemistry could also be a major step toward understanding how unique the conditions for life are beyond Earth, according to McCleary.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a point that wasn\u2019t lost on NASA. \u201cThis was a unique opportunity to study an ancient object from the distant galaxy, probably pre-dating our Sun and solar system,\u201d astro-chemist Martin Cordiner of NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center said in a public statement on June 22. \u201cOn the one hand, we get direct insight into that distant time and place, and on the other, we learn something about how unusual our own solar system may be.\u201d<\/p>\n

That \u201cunusual\u201d quality is evident in the fact that there is only one place humanity knows of in the universe where life formed, as it\u2019s built on a foundation of water and metals like carbon and oxygen. Finding a lack of these materials in 3I\/Atlas potentially indicates that the chemical conditions on Earth that allowed life to evolve are uncommon in the cosmos.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIf there\u2019s not a lot of the literal building blocks of life, if there\u2019s not a lot of these chemical elements, odds are you\u2019re not going to have much life 10 to 12 billion years ago, at least not wherever this comet came from,\u201d McCleary said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last year, an interstellar traveler entered our Solar System. Some speculated that it was an alien spacecraft, but…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":530995,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[909,61,60,9901,91,82,247],"class_list":["post-530994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-astrophysics","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-jacqueline-mccleary","tag-nasa","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=530994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530994\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/530995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=530994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=530994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=530994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}