New ‘pear formed’ anomaly seen on ‘alien spaceship’ 3I/atlas because it zooms by means of house
Avi Loeb has been keeping tabs on the mystery space object for months, tracking all the anomalies he’s found in its behaviour – and now he has clocked another one
The mystery space rock is zooming through space(Image: Getty)
A top space boffin has reported seeing another anomaly on a mystery object feared to be an alien spaceship as it hurtles through space – taking the total to 17.
Astrophysicist Avi Loeb said interstellar visitor 3I/Atlas was surrounded by a pear-shaped gas plume when data was collected by the SPHEREx space observatory last month.
And he said the water-gas emission is 20 times brighter than it was compared to previous data reported from SPHEREx last August. The newly released images also showed an anti-tail elongation in the direction of the Sun, he told readers of his latest blog post.
Loeb, a professor of science at top US university Harvard, said: “This inference raises a new anomaly concerning 3I/Atlas.
“It implies a huge amount of dust mass, because these same large boulders have to provide enough surface area to make the gas plume a hundred times brighter than the nucleus in reflected sunlight.
“We know that the fragments must be larger than a millimeter, because there is no evidence for a radiation-pressure dominated cometary tail of fine dust.”
The Manhattan-sized space rock has gripped stargazers in recent months and passed Earth no closer than about 170 million miles to our planet in December.
His theory that it might be alien technology sent to observe Earth attracted global headlines and he previously listed at least 16 strange behaviours which suggested it could be technological in nature, rather than a comet like most boffins believed.
He added in his latest blog: “The nature of the scattered sunlight in the glowing halo around 3I/Atlas has also fundamentally changed around perihelion, from an ice-dominated reflectance spectrum into that of low-albedo dust dominated by bluish light scattering.
“The SPHEREx data demonstrates once again that science is a learning experience. We need more data to guide us about the proper resolution of the above-mentioned anomaly.
“We should not be surprised to find out that objects arriving at our cosmic backyard in the inner solar system from the cosmic street of interstellar space, are different from the familiar icy rocks that we had seen before.”
For the latest breaking news and stories from across the globe from the Daily Star, sign up for our newsletter by clicking here.
