3I/Atlas could be a planetesimal
The scientific community currently classifies 3I/Atlas as a comet, Abraham Loeb has speculation, the theory that it could be an active extraterrestrial spacecraft and others classify it as other things, I am going to continue classifying it as an object. For what reason? Because, I think that the comet has the most votes, but the term object is used in astronomy to designate any object in the cosmos, the Earth is an object, a star is an object, an asteroid is an object, etc.
A comet is also an object, but they are not usually said that way once they are well defined, the term object is usually used when things are a little ambiguous, obviously you don't call the Earth an object, you call it a planet.
Why am I going to continue with the term object? Because of these interstellar objects that we know of three, in the future we are going to know many more, because with the new observatories we are going to discover more, it is estimated that only with the Vera C Rubín that has been built and inaugurated this summer in the north of Chile, around half a dozen, a dozen interstellar objects passing through the zone of the planets of the solar system will be discovered.
And I will continue to call them objects because they can be different things, Oumuamua was neither a comet nor an asteroid, it may have been a mixture of both or something rarer, 2I/Borisov was a comet, that one behaved like a comet and no one doubts that it was a comet and 3I/Atlas seems to be a comet, but there is something else that could be, apart from extraterrestrial ships and these things, it could be a planetesimal.
What is this? A planetesimal is the intermediate point when the planets are forming and the matter is grouped around the primordial masses of what the planets are going to form within that cloud of gas and dust that condenses and where a star begins to shine, at the beginning, they are specks of dust that gather together, increasingly larger objects are formed and there comes a point at which gravity begins to work a little and they would be the planetesimals, they range from 1 km to 100 km in diameter, from 100 km and that is what they would call protoplanets.
A planetesimal could be comparable to a comet, like the many that exist in the Oort cloud, well yes and no, the comets of the Oort cloud believe that they are remains left over from the formation of the solar system, many could fit within planetesimals, but the planetesimals that are found in the warmest zone, not in remote areas such as the Oort cloud or the Kuiiper belt, which are icy, cold and distant areas from the star, but in The temperate zones where the planets are now, these planetesimals are cooked in a different way and therefore have a different composition than that of comets.
These planetesimals have compounds like what typical rocks form, but also metallic compounds and they also have ice and frozen compounds, so this 3I/Atlas perhaps because of that very strange composition that it has and that anomalous amount of nickel that it has, a large amount of nickel compared to the amount of iron that has been discovered to be minuscule, that strange composition perhaps corresponds to a planetesimal that was forming in a relatively temperate area of its star system and that somehow, it was released a long, long, long time ago from its primordial home.
It could fit with that definition, but of course, to fit it and it would also give an answer to the strange composition it has, but to fit it we need more data and if possible get a little piece of it, but that is going to be complicated, not to say very difficult, I say difficult, not impossible, because I already told you that there were plans, not for this case, but for other cases or for comets, to use ships with a kind of giant umbrella that go around the area where the comet passed and thus collect the particles. of that comet.
They were old projects that were discarded because now, you can land on a comet, the European Space Agency achieved it, but it could be used in this case to since we are not going to be able to capture or get close to Tres and Atlas because it is going to move away and we do not have any ship available for it, at least take advantage of that plan and go through the area where he passed and see if there were any particles or something left, that is why I am going to continue using the term object until it is well defined what 3I/Atlas is.
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