The Great Comet Conundrum: 3I/ATLAS’s Reverse Tail Sparks Scientific Revolution

Astronomers have captured stunning new images of comet 3I/ATLAS, revealing a rare and mysterious phenomenon: a reverse or anti-tail that points toward the Sun instead of away from it. This interstellar comet, discovered on July 1, 2025, by the ATLAS telescope in Chile, has continued to defy expectations with its unusual behavior and structure. The latest observations, including those from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Virtual Telescope Project, show that 3I/ATLAS not only has a traditional dust tail blown away from the Sun, but also a prominent anti-tail composed of larger dust grains that are pushed sunward by the comet’s own internal activity.

 

Key Highlights

Sources: NASA Science , The Planetary Society, Space.com, ESA, Virtual Telescope Project