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SPHEREx Pre-perihelion Mapping of H2O, CO2, and CO in Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS

  • Authors: Carey M. Lisse, Yoonsoo P. Bach, Brendan P. Crill, Phil M. Korngut, Ari J. Cukierman, Sean A. Bryan, Asantha Cooray, C. Darren Dowell, Michael W. Werner, Joseph L. Hora, Zafar Rustamkulov, Jeong-Eun Lee, Bumhoo Lim, Y. R. Fernandez, Volker Tolls, W. T. Reach, O. Doré, Michael Zemcov, James J. Bock, Yun-Ting Cheng, C. Champagne, Seungwon Choi, M. Connelley, J. P. Emery, Spencer Everett, Andreas L. Faisst, Jooyeon Geem, Howard Hui, Masateru Ishiguro, Sunho Jin, Hangbin Jo, Max Mahlke, Daniel C. Masters, Gary J. Melnick, Chi H. Nguyen, Roberta Paladini, M. L. Sitko, Yujin Yang

Carey M. Lisse et al 2026 The Astrophysical Journal Letters 1000 .

  • Provider: AAS Journals

Caption: Figure 2.

(a) The flux density of the 2025 August measurements, scaled to a distance corrected geometry of robs = rhel = 1 au. The JWST measurements (M. A. Cordiner et al. 2025) are scaled by a constant factor of 1.5 to match the SPHEREx measurements. For flags, see Table 1 in the Appendix and text for explanation. The sky blue points are the JWST measurements, convolved with the pixel spectral throughput at the SPHEREx pixel for that observation, using the SPHEREx Sky Simulator (H. Hui et al. 2024; B. P. Crill et al. 2025). Blue shades indicate important spectral features. Colors of “good” measurements indicate Ffield (Equation (1)). (b) The distance-corrected ratio of the SPHEREx to JWST flux, showing that SPHEREx measurements are systematically higher than JWST ones. This indicates the spatial extendedness of the object, 3I. The error bars are not shown for data with S/N < 2. (c) The reflectance, normalized at 1.2 μm for the SPHEREx, JWST, and the IRTF measurements. The blue line shows the moving median of the IRTF data with a 0.2 μm window.

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