After over a month of government shutdown, NASA finally released new images of mysterious interstellar object 3I/ATLAS on Wednesday.
During the livestreamed event, NASA brass took pains to “address the rumors,” with associate administrator Amit Kshatriya vehemently denying a theory championed by Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb that we could be looking at an alien spacecraft coming to visit from a different star system.
“This object is a comet,” Kshatriya said. “It looks and behaves like a comet, and all evidence points towards it being a comet.”
The announcement appears to have angered Loeb. In a blog post, the astronomer criticized NASA for repeating the “official mantra that 3I/ATLAS is a natural comet,” arguing that “there was no big news.”
He quoted British author Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, that “there is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact” — effectively accusing NASA of misleadingly and prematurely discrediting his far-fetched theory.
The tense back-and-forth highlights a fascinating discussion over what’s deemed acceptable in scientific discourse — and what isn’t. While Loeb maintains that we shouldn’t discard the possibility that we could be looking at an alien spacecraft, NASA officials are clearly wary of adding any credence to the theory and are unwilling to entertain it.
NASA showed off an image of 3I/ATLAS taken by the HiRISE camera attached to its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the release of which was delayed by the government shutdown. It shows a “fuzzy white ball,” per Kshatriya, contrasted against the blackness of outer space.
Loeb argued that the image, as well as ultraviolet readings from NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft, only added “slightly to what we already learned this summer” through observations from NASA’s Hubble and James Webb space telescopes.
Instead, NASA “should have emphasized what we do not understand about 3I/ATLAS rather than insist that it is a familiar comet from a new birth environment,” he wrote.
Loeb has cataloged a dozen “anomalies” that he says could support the theory that 3I/ATLAS an “alien mothership,” including its enormous suspected mass, its highly improbable trajectory that had it blazing past several inner solar system planets, and gigantic “tightly-collimated jets” pointing towards and away from the Sun, as seen in recent observations by amateur astronomers.
“In case 3I/ATLAS is a natural icy rock as they suggest, Mother Nature was kinder to NASA than expected from a random delivery of rocks by at least a factor of 100,000,” Loeb wrote.
There’s still time before 3I/ATLAS leaves us for good. In December, the object is expected to make its closest pass to Earth, allowing us to once again point our ground- and space-based telescopes at it.
While NASA has cemented its stance on the matter, concluding that 3I/ATLAS is a natural comet, Loeb isn’t giving up. To him, it’s a matter of keeping an open mind.
“Imaginative scientists master the humility to learn something new from anomalies rather than display the arrogance of expertise,” he wrote in his latest blog post.
“Life is worth living if we allow for the unexpected to surprise us,” he added. “Bureaucrats or unimaginative scientists want us to believe in the expected. But the rest of us know that the best is yet to come.”
More on 3I/ATLAS: NASA Releases Long-Delayed Image of 3I/ATLAS
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