‘Alien ship’ 3I/ATLAS grows dagger-sharp anti-tail pointing instantly towards the Sun
31/ATLAS, a mysterious visitor to our solar system, is yet again raising fears that it’s an alien ship and not a comet, this time for its ‘anti-tail’ pointing directly at the Sun
If aliens did indeed send 31/ATLAS then they can’t tell their bosses they passed unobserved, as its ‘anti-tail’ is now putting boffins in a panic.
When Austrian astrophotographer Michael Jäger released his latest image of the Manhattan-sized interstellar visitor from November 28, astronomers and investigators immediately picked up on a weird feature that sets it apart from normal comets.
“What looks at first like a beautifully extended comet tail becomes, under closer inspection, a forensic puzzle,” wrote an expert. “An unnaturally sharp anti-tail pointing directly toward the sun… violates the basic physics that govern ordinary comet behaviour.”
Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has warned several times that 31/ATLAS doesn’t look or act like a comet. He’s pointed to a host of weird features, including evidence of thrusters. He recently suggested the spaceship may have dropped off probes to study Jupiter.
But legal expert Samuel Lopez is now backing his claims as the object nears its closest point to Earth on December 19.
Reviewing the latest image using techniques from legal cases, he claims to have reached an “unavoidable” conclusion. “This object continues to defy the natural explanations expected of icy debris passing through our solar system,” he writes.
The clearest clue that we’re dealing with an alien craft, he says, is its “long, dagger-straight anti-tail”. If 31/ATLAS were a standard comet, dust and ion tails would be pushed away from the sun by radiation pressure and solar wind.
“Yet 3I/ATLAS continues to form a luminous structure aligned in the opposite direction, sharply defined and geometrically clean,” he writes.
“No turbulence. No diffusion. No random particulate spread. It reads more like a controlled plume, as if the object is either interacting with its environment in a fundamentally unknown way or generating the effect through internal processes.”
NASA has continued to reject theories of an alien origin for 31/ATLAS, moving swiftly to calm the fears of worried observers such as Kim Kardashian.
Dr Tom Statler, the lead scientist for solar system small bodies with NASA, claimed that the interstellar visitor is a comet but revealed that it still gives him “goosebumps”.
“There is circumstantial evidence, given how fast it has come into our solar system, that it came from some very old solar system around a very old star,” he said.
“Quite possibly, we can’t say this for sure, but the likelihood is that it came from a solar system older than our own solar system itself, which gives me goosebumps to think about.”
3I/ATLAS, he added, isn’t just a window into another solar system but “a window into the deep past – and so deep into the past that it predates even the formation of our earth and the sun.”
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