Analyzing the Spectra of Objects in Changing Environments

This project will develop a workflow, building on my prior experience with large language model analysis, to analyze the spectroscopy of outgassing objects of unknown origin. One such object is known as 3I/Atlas, which is the third known interstellar object to enter our inner Solar System [1]. I hypothesize that the combination of spectroscopy and an analysis of 3I/Atlas’s trajectory will provide information about its origin. I will use tools such as PySCF [2] and CP2K [3] to calculate the density functional theory for the spectroscopy data of 3I/Atlas. To address the object’s outgassing, I will use smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) and direct simulation Monte Carlo with tools such as Phantom [4] and pantera-pic-dsmc [5]. To model the trajectory of the object, I will also build on the code of my past project (Modeling Fast-Moving Objects as They Travel through Crowded Astronomical Neighborhoods) and obtain data from the NASA JPL Horizons Database [6]. This project is significant as it will give us an understanding of the methods we may use to analyze the spectra of objects in changing environments.

[1] Cordiner, M., Roth, N.X., Micheli, M. et al. Isotopic evidence for a cold and distant origin of 3I/ATLAS. Nature 655, 870–874 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10771-6

[2] https://pyscf.org/

[3] https://www.cp2k.org/

[4] https://github.com/danieljprice/phantom

[5] https://github.com/vonkarmaninstitute/pantera-pic-dsmc

[6] https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons/