Secular Light Curve of Exocomet 3I/ATLAS, and its Location on a Comet Evolutionary Diagram
Ignacio Ferrin, Jose Garrido, Charles Triana, Giuliat Navas, Raul Melia, Santiago Perez, Emiliano Gomez, Jorge Andrey Vargas, Juan Hincapie, Brayan Quintero

TL;DR
This paper constructs the secular light curve of exocomet 3I/ATLAS, revealing potential binary nature and placing it within the Oort Cloud, offering insights into its composition, activity, and evolutionary status.
Contribution
It introduces the SLC-Methodology for exocomet analysis and applies it to 3I/ATLAS, providing new data on its properties and evolutionary context.
Findings
The colors of 3I are consistent with solar system comets.
The SLC shows a photometric anomaly suggesting a possible binary structure.
3I/ATLAS is classified as an Oort Cloud comet from another stellar system.
Abstract
In this work we will create the Secular Light Curve (SLC) of exocomet 3I/ATLAS, using the SLC-Methodology (Ferrin 2010-2023). The SLCs give a throve of new information and allow the comparison of exo-comets with comets of our own solar system. We arrive at the following conclusions: The colors of 3I are consistent and lie inside the area of colors of other comets in our solar system. The SLC of this comet exhibits a photometric anomaly, a region from -120 to -45 days before perihelion that we interpreted as an eclipse, suggesting that 3I might also be a binary. At -45 days, the SLC changes abruptly its slope, reaching a maximum absolute magnitude of mV(1,1,{\alpha}) = 6.8+-0.1. Using reported estimates derived from 97 papers in the arXiv.org depository for the size, dust, H2O, CO2, and CO production rates, we calculate the total mass loss. We use the inverse total mass loss, as a proxy…
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