Mysterious interstellar object 3I/ATLAS reached its perihelion, or its closest point to the Sun, earlier this year, shedding copious amounts of ice and dust in the process.

The material has formed enormous jets that reach out like a tail behind the visitor, which is widely believed to be a comet — and even an “anti-tail” that faces the Sun.

It’s such a violent process, astronomers have found that the surface of 3I/ATLAS’ nucleus could be dotted with erupting “ice volcanoes,” as Live Science reports. They posit that could make the visitor surprisingly similar to trans-Neptunian objects, faint chunks of rock and ice that form in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune’s orbit.

“We were all surprised,” Josep Trigo-Rodríguez, lead author of a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper and staff researcher at the

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