Pith Number

pith:LLYBXJLA

pith:2026:LLYBXJLANXRUWG656DEJPFYO65

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

Coma Physics of an Interstellar Object: JWST Spatial-Spectral Mapping of 3I/ATLAS

Cristina A. Thomas, Cyrielle Opitom, Davide Farnocchia, Dennis Bodewits, Dominique Bockelee-Morvan, Geronimo L. Villanueva, Jacques Crovisier, John W. Noonan, Kenji Furuya, Marco Micheli, Maria N. Drozdovskaya, Martin A. Cordiner, Megan E. Schwamb, Michael S.P. Kelley, Nathan X. Roth, Nicolas Biver, Sara Faggi, Stefanie N. Milam, Steven B. Charnley, Steven J. Bromley

JWST spatial-spectral maps show apolar volatiles anisotropically distributed in the coma of interstellar object 3I/ATLAS while polar ones are symmetric.

arxiv:2603.20460 v3 · 2026-03-20 · astro-ph.EP · astro-ph.GA

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\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{LLYBXJLANXRUWG656DEJPFYO65}

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2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

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The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

The spatial distributions of both quantities were highly anisotropic for the apolar species in the coma of 3I/ATLAS, yet were more nearly symmetric for the polar molecules. These results demonstrate how volatiles were segregated in the nucleus ices of 3I/ATLAS and reveal heating and cooling mechanisms in its coma.

C2weakest assumption

That the observed anisotropy in spatial distributions of column density and temperature directly indicates segregation of volatiles in the nucleus ices, rather than arising from projection effects, variable excitation, or other unmodeled coma dynamics.

C3one line summary

JWST spatial-spectral maps of 3I/ATLAS reveal CO as the primary volatile with H2O and CO2 abundances of 40.5% and 41.6% relative to CO, anisotropic distributions for apolar molecules, and a flat H2O OPR of 2.7.

Formal links

2 machine-checked theorem links

Cited by

3 papers in Pith

Post-perihelion Coma Composition of the Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS from Optical Spectroscopy

Origin and evolution of NiI and FeI in the coma of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS throughout its trajectory

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-28T01:05:12.121542Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

5af01ba5606de34b1bddf0c897970ef762da0815e530181a5c5bffce8dffc4c2

Aliases

arxiv: 2603.20460 · arxiv_version: 2603.20460v3 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2603.20460 · pith_short_12: LLYBXJLANXRU · pith_short_16: LLYBXJLANXRUWG65 · pith_short_8: LLYBXJLA

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Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/LLYBXJLANXRUWG656DEJPFYO65 \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 5af01ba5606de34b1bddf0c897970ef762da0815e530181a5c5bffce8dffc4c2

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "91dd37aaa0292726f9f4c4a9ba0aa9a25e6f73aa900584c5c0b1a7456c09008e",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "astro-ph.GA"
    ],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "astro-ph.EP",
    "submitted_at": "2026-03-20T19:40:35Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "ec4e57d31105a79dd38fa35c5e1d0f114af034b40a77ae2f448923603acb0272"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2603.20460",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 3
  }
}