{"id":38807,"date":"2025-07-30T13:48:40","date_gmt":"2025-07-30T11:48:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/?p=38807"},"modified":"2025-07-30T13:48:41","modified_gmt":"2025-07-30T11:48:41","slug":"precovery-observations-of-3i-atlas-from-tess-suggests-possible-distant-activity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/?p=38807","title":{"rendered":"Precovery Observations of 3I\/ATLAS from TESS Suggests Possible Distant Activity<span class=\"badge-status\" style=\"background:#787878\">OPEN ACCESS<\/span>&nbsp;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Adina D. Feinstein, John W. Noonan, Darryl Z. Seligman<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>submitted to AAS Journals, draft version: July 30, 2025<br>Data behind the figures can be found <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/afeinstein20\/atlas-tess\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>here<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/pdf\/2507.21967\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>PDF (OPEN ACCESS)<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"justify-text\">&#8220;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&#8217;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 \u00b1 0.1 and an absolute visual magnitude of HV = 12.5 \u00b1 0.3, consistent with magnitudes reported in July 2025, suggesting that 3I\/ATLAS may have been active out at \u223c6.4 au. Additionally, we extract a \u223c20 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.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Adina D. Feinstein, John W. Noonan, Darryl Z. Seligman submitted to AAS Journals, draft version: July 30, 2025Data behind the figures can be found here PDF (OPEN ACCESS) &#8220;3I\/ATLAS is the third macroscopic interstellar object&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[179],"tags":[6913,1870,6033],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38807"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38807"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38808,"href":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38807\/revisions\/38808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}