3I/ATLAS ‘shouldn’t be streaming gasoline if comet’ as ‘managed by aliens’ principle grows
Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has been claiming a comet called 3I/ATLAS is actually an alien spaceship sent to probe our solar system. The Manhattan-sized object passed Earth earlier this month
A Harvard Professor who claims a comet is actually an ‘alien spaceship’ has presented more evidence that 3I/ATLAS is not just a rock hurtling through space. The consensus among the science community on the mysterious object is that it is a comet.
However, astrophysicist Avi Loeb has been suggesting it has the characteristics of an alien spaceship sent to probe our solar system. The Manhattan-sized object passed by Earth earlier this month.
Despite the ‘alien spaceship’ failing to make contact with Earth, Loeb still believes it could be a probe controlled by aliens. The Harvard boffin argued 3I/ATLAS’s ‘anti-tail’ should not contain “streaming gas beyond a distance of 5,000 kilometers from the nucleus”.
The content of the ‘anti-tail’ can be tested by a molecular tracer which should help us to understand if it is a comet, the prof said.
Writing on his blog, Prof Loeb said: “Interestingly, this is roughly the traverse radius of the glowing halo (coma) around the nucleus of 3I/ATLAS in the images of 3I/ATLAS (including the Hubble Space Telescope images listed here).
“As the solar wind sweeps up the gas, it carries it together with sub-micron dust particles away from the Sun along the tail of 3I/ATLAS.
“However, the large dust particles above 10-microns continue to stream along the anti-tail out to a scale that is ~10 times longer in the direction of the Sun. On that scale, the jet is expected to be gas-free if 3I/ATLAS is a natural comet where gas is launched at a speed dictated by the sublimation of CO2 ice on the surface of a natural rock and limited to ~200 meters per second.”
He continued: “This result presents a clean test for the nature of 3I/ATLAS: if it is a natural comet, then the anti-tail jet should not include streaming gas beyond a distance of 5,000 kilometers from the nucleus. At distances much larger than 5,000 kilometers from 3I/ATLAS as a comet, the anti-tail should be composed primarily of a stream of 10-micron dust particles with no streaming gas.”
Prof Loeb also suggested how we probe the nature of the anti-tail’. He wrote: “The existence of streaming gas along the anti-tail can be tested through tagging a molecular tracer like CO2 or CO along the axis of the anti-tail jet and plotting the spatial profile of the tracer relative to scattered sunlight from dust inside the jet.
“Here’s hoping that such data will be collected by ground-based telescopes, like Keck, VLT or ALMA, or by space observatories like SPHEREx or the Webb telescope.”
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