Britt Jones
The massive rock heading toward Earth has received a significant update as scientists try to determine what it is.
The Manhattan-sized space rock is hurdling through space, and ever since it was detected on July 1, people have been puzzled by it.
NASA dubbed the rock 3I/ATLAS, and since its discovery, it hasn't been acting as expected.
While many say it’s a comet, other scientists who have been following its movements have determined it’s behaving too strangely to be a normal object.
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In particular, one scientist has claimed it could even be an 'alien mothership', with a few key differences which he claims are 'not natural', such as releasing a metal compound never seen before in nature, or the trajectory of its particles.
In a new paper on 3I/ATLAS, Harvard physicist Avi Loeb claims the ‘comet’ is missing one major marker that every comet shares.
“There were claims of a tail,” Loeb said, adding: “But since 3I/ATLAS is accelerating and its current size is not much larger than the angular resolution of Earth-based telescopes, it is not easy to avoid fictitious elongation of the image as a result of the object's motion.”
However, while much of his speculation was based on the lack of a tail, which he dubbed an 'anti-tail' because it pushed particles towards the sun rather than away from it, it seems that 3I/ATLAS has decided to grow one.
Images taken by Spain’s Nordic Optical Telescope in the Canary Islands last month show the object with a tail. The tail is composed of carbon dioxide and water, with cyanide and a nickel alloy, which has only been seen in human engineering.
The new appearance of a tail could have been created to slow it down, says Loeb, writing that it would be evidence of it using a ‘braking thrust’ manoeuvre.
Taking to his Medium blog, he wrote: “I suggested a `Loeb Scale’ for interstellar objects where `0’ is definitely a natural object (comet or asteroid) and `10’ is definitely a technological object (identified by manoeuvres or emission of artificial light or signals).
"Currently, I give 3I/ATLAS a 6 on that scale, but my assessment will change as we get better data on it when it comes closer to the Sun.”
But Loeb has now said this could be indicative of ‘controlled manoeuvring’ as well as the probability of a high-impact 'Black Swan' event through what he describes as an 'Oberth manoeuvre', where it uses the sun's gravity to alter its course.
In a previous Q&A session, he said that 'from an engineer's perspective' a 'mothership that releases mini-probes' would perform this manoeuvre to 'slow down at perihelion and intercept Earth, taking advantage of the Sun’s gravitational assist', though this would depend on the 'mass of the mini-probe'.
"As of now, I assign a 30 to 40 per cent likelihood that 3I/ATLAS does not have a fully natural origin." Loeb wrote on his blog.
"This low-probability scenario includes the possibility of a black swan event akin to a Trojan Horse, where a technological object masquerades as a natural comet."
Regardless of what the object is, the International Asteroid Warning Network has added 3I/ATLAS to its list for further scientific monitoring, as they said on their website that while it 'poses no threat', it gives a 'great opportunity' for observation 'due to its prolonged observability from Earth and its high interest to the scientific community'.