Mysterious interstellar object 3I/ATLAS has reemerged from behind the Sun, allowing astronomers to once again get a glimpse at the rare visitor.
The object, which is generally believed by experts to be a comet that’s predominantly made up of carbon dioxide ice, is continuing on its highly eccentric trajectory, and is expected to make its closest pass of the Earth just days before Christmas on its way back out of our star system.
And judging by the latest data, 3I/ATLAS has survived its perihelion — or its closest approach to the Sun — largely intact, instead of breaking apart, as Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb had hypothesized in a blog post earlier this week.
New images of 3I/ATLAS, taken by the Nordic Optical Telescope on the Canary Islands, “show a single body, with no evidence for breakup following the perihelion passage two weeks earlier,” Loeb conceded in a Wednesday followup post.
The images also show 3I/ATLAS’ prominent “anti-tail,” an accumulation of jets that points towards the Sun, suspected to be made up of larger dust particles less affected by the Sun’s radiation pressure.
However, to Loeb that’s just one out of two possible scenarios. These jets could also be evidence of “thrusters on a technological spacecraft,” as he told NBC News on Monday.
If so, Loeb suggests that if 3I/ATLAS really is a visitor from a technological civilization — a possibility he’s floated repeatedly — then it may be trying to boost its exit from the solar system to a breakneck pace. (Let’s face it: getting away from Earth as rapidly as possible makes perfect sense these days.)
“Technological thrusters which point their exhaust towards the Sun would accelerate away from the Sun,” Loeb noted in his latest blog post. “This post-perihelion maneuver might be employed by a spacecraft that aims to gain speed rather than slow down through the gravitational assist from the Sun.”
It’s only one of several “anomalies” Loeb has catalogued to support his theory that 3I/ATLAS could be some sort of alien spacecraft visiting the solar system. Loeb had already discussed the object’s “anti-tail” in early September. The appendage was first made apparent in August images taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, but has grown in length since then.
Of course, most of his peers think it’s just a natural comet. Loeb’s far-fetched theory has led to plenty of skepticism from within the scientific community.
In a September 29 blog post, Pennsylvania State University astronomer Jason Wright refuted Loeb’s claim that 3I/ATLAS’ anti-tail was unique and could be alien technology, pointing out several previous observations of “similar sunward enhancement” caused by large, ejected dust grains that “don’t get swept up by the solar wind on the Sun-facing side of a comet.”
Wright also pointed to a 1974 paper that discussed the “anomalous tail of Comet Kohoutek,” an object that was first discovered the year prior, in 1973.
But Loeb isn’t ready to give up hope that we could be looking at an alien spacecraft.
According to his calculations, 3I/ATLAS could be far more enormous than previously thought, based on the huge amount of mass it’s shedding, with a surface area equivalent of a sphere with a diameter of 14.3 miles. That’s four times as large as his previous estimates.
“Alien-tech thrusters might employ yet higher exhaust speeds, reducing the required mass loss by several orders of magnitude and making the required fuel a small fraction of the spacecraft mass,” he determined in a previous blog post.
To Loeb, it’s a matter of keeping an open mind, even in light of overwhelming evidence. Besides, if 3I/ATLAS were to be an alien mothership, there’s no saying what kind of risks it could pose to humanity.
“The foundation of science is the curiosity, the humility to learn,” he told NBC News. “Let’s just wait a few more weeks, we’ll figure it out, and let’s hope that there will be no gifts from this object for the holidays on Earth.”
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