A massive comet traveling through the solar system is much larger than previously thought and could be a remnant of alien technology, a scientist claims in a new report.
3I/ATLAS was first identified in July by NASA’s Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System. The U.S. space agency confirmed the object is an interstellar object — only the third such object to have ever been spotted — following Comet 2I/Borisov that passed through in 2019 and ‘Oumuamua, a cigar-shaped object that appeared in 2017.
But 3I/Atlas is different and has some scientists questioning its origins. In a new study, Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb and his team said mass of ATLAS “must be bigger than 33 billion tons” with a nucleus larger than 3.1 miles. The object is also shedding large amounts of carbon dioxide and dust as it zooms toward the sun.
“This suggests that 3I/ATLAS is more massive than the other two interstellar objects, 1I/`Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov by 3–5 orders of magnitude, constituting a major anomaly,” Loeb wrote in a blog post.
The massive object is traveling toward the sun extremely fast, around 152,000 mph and is on an flat and straight trajectory that’s unlike anything else in the solar system.
“A future detection of a major maneuver of 3I/ATLAS would suggest propulsion by a technologically manufactured engine,” Loeb wrote, adding in an earlier paper that the “hypothesis in question is that (31/ATLAS) is a technological artifact, and furthermore has active intelligence.”