{"id":229874,"date":"2026-01-27T02:24:16","date_gmt":"2026-01-27T08:24:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/hubble-images-of-3i-atlas-during-its-rare-alignment-with-the-sun-earth-axis-on-january-22-2026"},"modified":"2026-01-27T02:24:16","modified_gmt":"2026-01-27T08:24:16","slug":"hubble-images-of-3i-atlas-during-its-rare-alignment-with-the-sun-earth-axis-on-january-22-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/hubble-images-of-3i-atlas-during-its-rare-alignment-with-the-sun-earth-axis-on-january-22-2026","title":{"rendered":"Hubble Images of 3I\/ATLAS During Its Rare Alignment with the Sun-Earth Axis on January 22, 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4\/3; object-fit: contain;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/8SsLVDxSPsQ?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;\n   picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Good news. The rare cosmic alignment between the interstellar visitor <a class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/3I\/ATLAS\" rel=\"noopener ugc nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">3I\/ATLAS<\/a>, the Earth and the Sun, was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope on January 22, 2026.<\/p>\n<p>A new set of six 170 second exposures, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope between 13:10:30 and 13:43:33 UTC on January 22, 2026, were just posted <a class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/archive.stsci.edu\/proposal_search.php?mission=hst&id=18152\" rel=\"noopener ugc nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>. The exposures display brightness maps of the glowing halo surrounding 3I\/ATLAS. The glow is elongated by about 100,000 kilometers in the direction of the Sun, a length scale which is about ten times larger than the Earth\u2019s diameter.<\/p>\n<p>In a new paper that I published with Mauro Barbieri <a class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/iopscience.iop.org\/article\/10.3847\/2515-5172\/ae3a77\" rel=\"noopener ugc nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>, we alerted astronomers to this \u201cfull Moon phase\u201d of 3I\/ATLAS when observers from Earth will see it from the direction of the Sun to within an extremely small misalignment angle of just 0.012 radians. This rare alignment resulted in a brightness surge whose magnitude and growth rate are dictated by the composition and structure of the particles shed by jets of 3I\/ATLAS. No new data other than the Hubble images was made public as of yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Good news. The rare cosmic alignment between the interstellar visitor 3I\/ATLAS, the Earth and the Sun, was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope on January 22, 2026. A new set of six 170 second exposures, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope between 13:10:30 and 13:43:33 UTC on January 22, 2026, were just posted here. The [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1965,48,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-229874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mapping","category-particle-physics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229874\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}