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Interstellar Visitor 3I/ATLAS Is Either an Extraterrestrial Spacecraft… or Something Much, Much Stranger!
Interstellar visitor 3I-ATLAS has certainly outshone its cosmic predecessors in terms of strangeness, having racked up an impressive list of anomalous behaviors and features that make 2017’s ‘Oumuamua and 2019’s 2I/Borisov seem downright ordinary, illustrating that either what we don’t know about the universe runs much deeper than we assume, or that 3I/ATLAS may be an artificial object from an extraterrestrial civilization, as Galileo Project lead Avi Loeb speculates.
Having led a 2023 expedition that aimed to recover potential interstellar materials from the floor of the Indian Ocean, Harvard University’s Avi Loeb has been very vocal in reminding astronomers, astrophysicists and researchers in related fields to keep an open mind in regards to the potential that 3I/ATLAS might be an extraterrestrial spacecraft or probe. While the former chair of Harvard’s Astronomy Department admits that it is much more likely that the object is a naturally-occurring comet, he has compiled a list of strange anomalies displayed by 3I/ATLAS that may point to the opposite.
Over the course of July and August of this year, 3I/ATLAS began to display a cometary tail, but one that pointed toward the Sun, as opposed to being blown outward by the solar wind, something that Loeb says “is not an optical illusion from geometric perspective, unlike familiar comets.”
The comet’s gases also contain much more nickel than iron, a mix more characteristic of industrially-produced nickel alloys than naturally-occurring comets. Additionally, 3I/ATLAS has a nickel to cyanide ratio “that is orders of magnitude larger than that of all known comets,” including that of previous 2019’s interstellar visitor 2I/Borisov, with a likelihood of this being a natural occurrence below 1 percent, according to Loeb.
3I/ATLAS’ gas plume also sports a very low amount of water—only four percent by mass—while all other comets, traditionally characterized as “dirty snowballs”, are virtual fountains of evaporating water.
The solid nucleus of 3I/ATLAS is also “about a million times more massive than 1I/`Oumuamua and a thousand times more massive than 2I/Borisov,” while moving at a substantially faster clip than its predecessors. Astronomers have calculated that large objects in interstellar space are a rare occurrence, with their rarity increasing with size, leading Loeb to determine that the likelihood of 3I/ATLAS being a natural object to be less than 0.1 percent.
3I/ATLAS’ trajectory is curiously in-line with the plane of the orbits of the Solar System’s planets, called the plane of the ecliptic, coming to within five degrees of matching that plane; Loeb calculates the probability of this being mere chance at only 0.2 percent.
Adding to this orbital anomaly, the timing of 3I/ATLAS’ arrival ensured that it passed within mere tens of millions of kilometers of Venus, Mars and Jupiter, while remaining obscured from Earth as it makes its closest pass behind the Sun, a period in its passage when the object should be at its most active. Loeb calculates the likelihood of this occurring naturally to be less than 0.005 percent.
The light reflecting off of the gases in 3I/ATLAS’ coma “showed extreme negative polarization,” according to Loeb, “unprecedented for all known comets, including 2I/Borisov.” This means that the oscillations of the reflected photons appear to be oriented along the triangular plane formed between 3I/ATLAS, the Sun and the Earth, with the likelihood of this occurring naturally being below one percent.
Perhaps one of the strangest aspects of 3I/ATLAS is that it originates from a direction that is within nine degrees of the direction that the Wow! radio signal, a strong candidate for an artificial extraterrestrial transmission intercepted by Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope in 1977, came from. Loeb calculates the likelihood of this happening at 0.6 percent.
More recently, 3I/ATLAS experienced a non-gravitational acceleration as it neared perihelion, or its closest distance to the Sun, adding several dozens of unexpected kilometers-per-day each day to its already considerable velocity. While Loeb points out that this is likely due to 3I/ATLAS being propelled by escaping gases acting as a natural rocket, he also speculates that this “might be the technological signature of an internal engine.”
Loeb calculates that if the anomalous acceleration is instead due to natural processes, 3I/ATLAS will appear to lose about one-tenth of its mass, an occurrence that should be apparent to Earth and space-based observatories as it emerges from behind the Sun over the course of November and December.
Curiously, 3I/ATLAS’ coma became inexplicably bluer in hue than expected as it slipped behind the Sun: similar to the process that produces the colors of a sunset, sunlight scattered by dust from the comet should have tinted the gases red, but instead its color has been observed to be higher in the spectrum than what our star is emitting. Loeb says that while this strange coloration may be due to “a hot engine or a source of artificial light,” he also adds that it could be caused by the “signature of ionized carbon monoxide” emitted by natural comets.
Loeb calculates that when all of these miniscule probabilities are combined the cumulative likelihood of 3I/ATLAS being a naturally-occurring comet is less than one in ten quadrillion (that’s one with 17 zeros), meaning that regardless of whether our strange visitor is artificial or not, we have a lot to learn from objects originating from beyond the Solar System.
“We have to collect as much data as possible to figure out the nature of this anomalous object,” Loeb wrote in his personal blog on Medium. “The implication of alien technology would be huge and therefore we must take this possibility seriously.
“Our biggest rocket, Starship, is a hundred times smaller than 3I/ATLAS, so in case 3I/ATLAS were technological — its senders would have mastered capabilities that go well beyond our technologies.”
“Science is better than fiction, because nature might be more imaginative than the best script writers for science fiction movies in Hollywood,” Loeb added when asked how the prospect of 3I/ATLAS being a technological artifact compared to the content of sci-fi stories. “Rather than imagining who our dating partner might be, we would be better off observing our partner.”
