3I/ATLAS opened: the literature to November 2026

Gathered every paper on 3I/ATLAS on arXiv to 2 November 2026 (96, with authors checked against DataCite and Crossref), the discovery circulars [@mpc2025mpecn12] [@cbat2025cbet5578], JPL orbit solution 55 and Horizons ephemerides [@jpl2026sbdb3i] [@jpl2026horizons3i], the MPC observation archive [@mpc2026observations3i], and the agency releases and news coverage.

Built the timeline from discovery on 1 July 2025 [@seligman2025discovery] through perihelion on 29 October 2025 to JPL's orbit of 21 October 2026, which was made to support a new JWST programme, and placed the observatories that made the key measurements.

Set the questions where the literature disagrees: what it is made of, how big it is, what pushes it, where and when it formed, whether it is natural, and why it changed across perihelion. Where papers give numbers with errors, they are entered as measurements: Hubble's nucleus radius of 1.3 ± 0.2 km [@hui2026nucleus] falls wholly outside the range the 5-km answer needs [@cloete2025upper]; the three reported water peaks [@combi2025water] [@tan2026perihelion] [@bockeleemorvan2026nearperihelion] have no published intervals, so they cannot yet decide between the two water answers.

Weighed the new results of 2026: water D/H near 1 per cent and methane D/H 14 times comet 67P's [@cordiner2026isotopic] [@roth2026enriched], high carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios [@opitom2026high], amorphous silicates [@thomas2026jwst], a nitrogen-rich ion tail [@ferellec2026ion], and the finding that the orbit cannot tell which gas drives the push [@krolikowska2026nongravitational].