For over two months, astronomers have been tracking 3I/ATLAS, a massive interstellar object currently hurtling through the solar system at staggering speed.
The unusual visitor is only the third interstellar object ever detected.
It follows the discovery of ‘Oumuamua in 2017 and 2I/Borisov in 2019.
Scientists generally believe 3I/ATLAS to be a comet.
However, new findings suggest the object is far stranger and much larger than anyone first thought.
Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has spent years exploring whether some of these cosmic intruders could be artifacts of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations.
Loeb now suggests 3I/ATLAS may be tens of billions of tons in mass.
By studying its unusual trajectory, Loeb and his colleagues determined its “non-gravitational acceleration” was “smaller than 49 feet per day, squared.”
Combined with data on how much material the object is shedding, Loeb inferred that the “mass of 3I/ATLAS must be bigger than 33 billion tons.”
“Consequently, the diameter of its solid-density nucleus must be larger than [3.1 miles],” he wrote in a recent blog post.
That size would make 3I/ATLAS three to five orders of magnitude larger than either of the two previously discovered interstellar visitors.
The finding is a rare and puzzling result.
Loeb underscored just how unusual the find is:
“Given the limited reservoir of heavy elements, we should have discovered on the order of a hundred thousand interstellar objects on the 0.1-kilometer scale of 1I/’Oumuamua before finding 3I/ATLAS, yet we only detected two interstellar objects previously.”
The object’s highly unusual trajectory only adds to the mystery.
In just over a week, 3I/ATLAS will come within 1.67 million miles of Mars’ orbit around the Sun.
Loeb has described the course as a “remarkable fine-tuning.”
That close pass offers an opportunity to point NASA’s HiRISE camera, attached to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, directly at the interstellar visitor.
“The amount of sunlight reflected from the brightest pixel in the HiRISE image will constrain further the nucleus surface area for an assumed albedo value,” Loeb wrote.
And Loeb isn’t ruling out the extraordinary.
If the HiRISE data confirms a core larger than 3.1 miles, he argues, “then an origin associated with the interstellar mass reservoir of rocky material will be untenable.”
“Is 3I/ATLAS an unusually massive comet with an unusual chemical composition on an unusually rare trajectory or alien technology?” Loeb asked.
“In both cases, the object could shed CO2 and H2O ices from material that collected on its frozen surface as it plowed through interplanetary and interstellar space.”
Loeb cautioned against rushing to judgment.
“We should not decide about the nature of 3I/ATLAS based on the chemical composition of its skin,” he warned, “for the same reason that we should not judge a book by its cover.”
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