Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Mysterious interstellar object 3I/ATLAS has come and — mostly — gone. Scientists have been fascinated by the intriguing lump of ice and dust as it careened into the inner solar system last year, making its closest pass of the Sun in the fall and careening by the Earth on its way out. In the upcoming weeks, it’s expected to have a close encounter with Jupiter before it leaves our star system for good. Meanwhile, researchers are continuing to pore over the wealth of data gathered by ground- and space-based telescopes about the rare visitor, which was only the third interstellar object to be spotted passing through our solar system. As detailed in a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, an international team of researchers including NASA scientists examined observations of the object made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) between August and October, the months leading up to its closest pass of the Sun, or …