Comet and potential alien probe 3I/ATLAS larger than predicted

We’re gonna need a bigger telescope.

Scientists have discovered that the 3I/ATLAS — a Manhattan-sized interstellar object that potentially has alien tech — is much larger than previously thought, according to a new report.

First discovered by NASA on July 1, the cosmic anomaly has been under watch by Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb and his team as it shoots across the solar system. The object, which is believed to be a comet, reportedly has interstellar origins, making it the third ever object from beyond the solar system ever detected after ‘Oumuamua, which was discovered in 2017, and 2I/Borisov in 2019.

Now the team has gleaned some “sizable” new intel on the interstellar visitor, namely that the “mass of 3I/ATLAS must be bigger than 33 billion tons,” per a blog post by Loeb.

They arrived at this number by calculating the object’s trajectory to find that ATLAS’s “gravitational acceleration” is “smaller than 49 feet per day, squared,” Futurism reported.

This was then compared to how much mass it was shedding via gases and dust particles to determine the size.

Loeb and co. also found that the diameter of its solid-density nucleus must be larger than 3.1 miles — the upper limit of current projections that are based on observations by the Hubble Space Telescope.

This makes it larger than “three to five orders of magnitude” more massive than its predecessors, ‘Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov.

Loeb is particularly fascinated by ATLAS’ rarity, which is akin to a needle in an intergalactic haystack. “Given the limited reservoir of heavy elements, we should have discovered on the order of a hundred thousand interstellar objects on the 0.1-kilometer scale of 1I/’Oumuamua before finding 3I/ATLAS, yet we only detected two interstellar objects previously,” he exclaimed.

Thankfully, despite rocketing toward home base, ATLAS poses no threat to Earth. However, its anomalous trajectory will bring it suspiciously close to Jupiter, Venus and Mars, with the entity passing within 1.67 million miles of Mars’ orbit around the Sun over the weekend.

More controversially, Loeb and his team believe that the celestial passerby, which is comprised mostly of carbon dioxide, could potentially be an alien probe that was sent to conduct reconnaissance on Earth — possibly with hostile intentions.

“The hypothesis in question is that [31/ATLAS] is a technological artifact, and furthermore has active intelligence. If this is the case, then two possibilities follow,” Dr. Loeb, Adam Drowl and Adam Hibberd, wrote in a paper published on July 17. “First, that its intentions are entirely benign and second, they are malign.”

They felt that it could be a spacecraft based on several pieces of evidence, namely its non-gravitational acceleration and its unusual approach to Venus, Mars and Jupiter, which the paper postulated could be “key target planets.”

31/ATLAS’s “low retrograde tilt” — spinning in the opposite direction of the solar system’s other bodies — would seemingly allow it to “access our planet with relative impunity.”

Loeb further suggests that the tilt and pathway would allow the intelligent life on the object to gather “astrometric measurements, to determine the orbits and masses of the Solar System planets, allowing it to prepare an optimal approach strategy to the Solar System.”