Interstellar comets provide rare opportunities for probing the diversity of refractory and volatile inventory around other stars. As the second ever interstellar comet, and the third interstellar object, 3I/ATLAS has been the focus of telescopic observations since its discovery in July 2025. Following the previous observations at multi-wavelengths, we present further radio observations of the 1665/1667 MHz ground-state OH lines and millimeter observations of the CO(J=1-0) transition at 115.271 GHz that trace the coma H2O and CO abundances, respectively. We derived OH production rates of (1.32±0.47)×1028s−1 at 2.27 au and (1.89±0.37)×1028s−1 at 1.96 au as well as an average CO production rate of (5.75±1.91)×1027s−1 between 2.33 and 1.75 au, inferring a CO/H2O ratio of (28±11%). With the mean HCN production rate of 2.5×1025s−1 at 2.1 au reported by \citet{2025arXiv251120845R} and \citet{2025arXiv251002817C}, we infer a CO/HCN ratio of (230±76). By synthesizing water production rates measured with instruments of different apertures, we found that the sublimation from extended source in the coma contributes significantly to 3I's pre-perihelion water measurements, accounting for up to 80\% from 3 au to 2 au.
@article{arxiv.2602.14218,
title = {Pre-perihelion Volatile Evolution of Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS Indicating Significant Contribution from Extended Source in the Coma},
author = {Juncen Li and Xian Shi and Man-To Hui and Jianchun Shi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.14218},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
14 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in ApJL