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In a blog post over the weekend, Loeb pointed to observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, which showed a "glow of light, likely from a coma, ahead of the motion of 3I/ATLAS towards the Sun." A coma is the hazy and luminous cloud that surrounds the nucleus of a comet. However, there's "no evidence for a bright cometary tail in the opposite direction," he wrote, with scientists suggesting it was evidence that dust was evaporating from the object's Sun-facing side. The observations led Loeb and his colleagues to an intriguing, albeit far-fetched possibility: is the mysterious space object generating "its own light?"
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