Mysterious interstellar object 3I/ATLAS recently made its closest pass of the Sun, or perihelion, brightening up in observations as solar radiation caused it to shed gases at an immense rate.

The object, widely believed to be a comet, is losing a staggering amount of mass as it reemerges from behind the Sun — so much, in fact, that Harvard astrophysicist and close 3I/ATLAS watcher Avi Loeb suggests that it may have just broken up into well over a dozen pieces.

New images taken by British astronomers Michael Buechner and Frank Niebling show the object growing a massive “anti-tail” and a separate, “smoking” trail, jets that extend approximately 620,000 miles towards the Sun and 1,860,000 miles in the opposite direction, respectively, as Loeb notes in a new blog post.

“For a natural comet,

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