Sebastian Voltmer has published a stunning image of the "comet" 3I/ATLAS taken on 1 December

Sebastian Voltmer has published a stunning image of the "comet" 3I/ATLAS taken on 1 December. Well-informed viewers are asking how to explain the green anti-tail, which moves against the solar wind, and the opposite blue tail, which moves with it. I, for my part, simply read clever people and marvel at the number of hypotheses and inferences.

Has a single natural comet in the entire history of observation ever looked like this? Is it true that the nickel-ion-rich "anti-trail" moving against the solar wind, and the blue plasma tail moving with it, cannot be reproduced by any standard model of a comet? How persuasive is the suggestion that the red, green, blue and violet hues accompanying ATLAS might be caused by the gravitational field of the Sun and Jupiter? I should very much like to hear what scientists make of this; to my mind it is the most interesting topic of late 2025.

And however that may be, we have witnessed the finest interstellar light show ever to have appeared before the eyes of an observer on Earth. Perhaps the most striking thing of all is the realisation that our entire history is very young compared with the age of this phenomenon.

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At the close of the Strugatskys' "Roadside Picnic" the Golden Sphere is asked for this: "Happiness for everybody, free, and let nobody go away unsatisfied!" I do not promise to leave no one aggrieved, but the digest really does come free

At the close of the Strugatskys' "Roadside Picnic" the Golden Sphere is asked for this: "Happiness for everybody, free, and let nobody go away unsatisfied!" I do not promise to leave no one aggrieved, but the digest really does come free. So, here is the

Frederic Leighton

Frederic Leighton. “Daedalus and Icarus”, 1869 Daedalus warns his son not to climb too high: the heat of the sun may melt the wax, but Icarus is already gazing into the distance, and the lamentations of a foolish old man interest him not in the least

Sebastian Voltmer has published a stunning image of the "comet" 3I/ATLAS taken on 1 December

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At the close of the Strugatskys' "Roadside Picnic" the Golden Sphere is asked for this: "Happiness for everybody, free, and let nobody go away unsatisfied!" I do not promise to leave no one aggrieved, but the digest really does come free

Frederic Leighton

Attempts to resolve the problems of many years of uncontrolled mass migration

Characters from Gogol's "Petersburg Tales" on the pedestal of the monument to Nikolai Gogol on Nikitsky Boulevard, photograph of the 1960s