Hubble Images of 3I/ATLAS During Its Rare Alignment with the Sun-Earth Axis on January 22, 2026
Good news. The rare cosmic alignment between the interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS, the Earth and the Sun, was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope on January 22, 2026.
A new set of six 170 second exposures, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope between 13:10:30 and 13:43:33 UTC on January 22, 2026, were just posted here. The exposures display brightness maps of the glowing halo surrounding 3I/ATLAS. The glow is elongated by about 100,000 kilometers in the direction of the Sun, a length scale which is about ten times larger than the Earth’s diameter.
In a new paper that I published with Mauro Barbieri here, we alerted astronomers to this “full Moon phase” of 3I/ATLAS when observers from Earth will see it from the direction of the Sun to within an extremely small misalignment angle of just 0.012 radians. This rare alignment resulted in a brightness surge whose magnitude and growth rate are dictated by the composition and structure of the particles shed by jets of 3I/ATLAS. No new data other than the Hubble images was made public as of yet.
When the Hubble images from the January 22, 2026 alignment were processed by my collaborator Toni Scarmato through the Larson-Sekanina Rotational Gradient filter — which removes the circularly symmetric glow around the nucleus, the residuals showed the system of 4 jets, including a prominent anti-tail directed nearly towards the Sun and Earth, supplemented by three mini-jets. The mini-jets are equally separated from each other by an angle of 120 degrees, and one of them (labeled by a position angle PA=120 degrees in the above image) is faint, possibly because it is hidden in an unfavorable orientation relative to Earth.
If the anti-tail had been exactly pointed at Earth, it would have been embedded in the circularly symmetric glow around 3I/ATLAS. However, in the latest paper that I co-authored with Toni Scarmato (available here), we showed that the jet system wobbles periodically every 7.2 hours by +/- 20 degrees around the rotation axis. This explains why it is unlikely for the anti-tail jet to be aligned to better than 20 degrees with the Sun-Earth axis most of the time.
Among the 18 anomalies of 3I/ATLAS listed here, we still do not know the nature of the anti-tail that allows it to penetrate hundreds of thousands of kilometers through the Solar wind and radiation without being deflected away from the Sun, as often is the case in familiar cometary tails. Is the anti-tail composed of fragments of ice (as suggested in a paper I published with Eric Keto here), large dust grains (as I suggested here), or massive objects (as I published here)? The symmetric system of 3 mini-jets that supplement the anti-tail remains a potential technological signature (as discussed here).
As I explained in a new television interview an hour ago (posted here), there is still a lot to learn about 3I/ATLAS. The best is likely yet to come.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
