Precovery Observations of 3I/ATLAS from TESS Suggests Possible Distant ActivityOPEN ACCESS
Adina D. Feinstein, John W. Noonan, Darryl Z. Seligman
submitted to AAS Journals, draft version: July 30, 2025
Data behind the figures can be found here
“3I/ATLAS is the third macroscopic interstellar object detected traversing the Solar System. Since its initial discovery on UT 01 July 2025, hundreds of hours on a range of observational facilities have been dedicated to measure the physical properties of this object. These observations have provided astrometry to refine the orbital solution, photometry to measure the color, a rotation period and secular light curve, and spectroscopy to characterize the composition of the coma. Here, we report precovery photometry of 3I/ATLAS as observed with NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). 3I/ATLAS was observed nearly continuously by TESS from UT 07 May 2025 to 02 June 2025. We use the shift-stack method to create deep stack images to recover the object. These composite images reveal that 3I/ATLAS has an average TESS magnitude of Tmag = 19.6 ± 0.1 and an absolute visual magnitude of HV = 12.5 ± 0.3, consistent with magnitudes reported in July 2025, suggesting that 3I/ATLAS may have been active out at ∼6.4 au. Additionally, we extract a ∼20 day light curve and find no statistically significant evidence of a nucleus rotation period. Nevertheless, the data presented here are some of the earliest precovery images of 3I/ATLAS and may be used in conjunction with future observations to constrain the properties of our third interstellar interloper.”
