AI Summary

The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS carries a chemical clue to the conditions in its parent planetary system. Its methane spectrum shows an unusually high ratio of heavy hydrogen to ordinary hydrogen, indicating that the comet’s frozen material formed in an extremely cold environment around another star or in the precursor cloud. Researchers from American University and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center used the James Webb Space Telescope to measure this ratio. They found it to be about 13 times higher than the ratio measured in comet 67P/Churyumov‑Gerasimenko, a comet that likely originated in our own solar system.

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