Giant telescope scans 3I/ATLAS for signs of alien life

They’ve got their 3Is on the prize.

The highly anticipated data 3I/ATLAS’ Earth tour last month is in. A targeted scan of 3I/ATLAS for signs of radio transmitting tech has come up empty — but Harvard scientist Avi Loeb claims this doesn’t disprove the comet’s potential artificial origins.

“It is unclear whether a technological object would transmit radio signals to its senders because such signals would take tens of thousands of years to cross the Milky Way Galaxy,” the astrophysicist told The Post. “Moreover, any such signal may not be transmitted in the direction of Earth or at the frequency band or date that were monitored.

The international team, from the extra-terrestrial signal hunting group Breakthrough Listen, had reportedly pointed the 328-foot Green Bank Telescope — the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world — at our interplanetary visitor a day ahead of its closest approach to Earth on December 19, Science Alert reported.

Loeb said he encouraged the team to check given that 3I/ATLAS arrived from a direction that “coincided” within nine degrees of the famous “Wow! Signal,” a baffling radio transmission captured by Ohio State University’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project.

Hoping to get a bead on the cosmic snowball’s composition and provenance, Breakthrough Listen had the West Virginia-based telescope listen to the comet for five hours, per the yet-to-be-peer-reviewed study.

To rule out any non-ATLAS transmissions, the team of alien hunters alternated between aiming Green Bank at the comet and the sky, switching every five minutes.

Despite their meticulous approach, the telescope didn’t pick up any “candidate signals” from the comet, Futurism reported.

“No artificial radio emission localized to 3I/ATLAS was detected,” the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI) declared on its website.

Meanwhile, the Breakthrough Listen paper noted that “3I/ATLAS exhibits mostly typical cometary characteristics, including a coma and an unelongated nucleus” and that there is “no evidence” to indicate that it is anything other than a “natural astrophysical” object.

This discovery aligned with NASA’s official position that the object is of cometary provenance.

Nonetheless, the ET researchers didn’t entirely rule of its extraterrestrial origins, writing, “Given the small number of such objects known (only three to date), and the plausibility of interstellar probes as a technosignature, thorough study is warranted.”

Loeb believed that the rather cursory examination was not enough to definitely determine that 3I/ATLAS was not technological.

“They looked in the direction of 3I/Atlas on December 18th,” the scientist told The Post. “That’s one day out of the 8,000 years that the 3I/Atlas spent on its way in, 8,000 years that it will spend on its way out.”

He analogized their conclusion to not receiving a call on a particular day and concluding that nobody would ever call them.

Loeb added that in the unlikely event that ATLAS was a “primitive technology” like radio, the signal might not have passed through the Earth because the sender would likely “actually beam the radiation in the direction of wherever the target is.”

In fact, he found it highly improbable that they were sending transmissions of any kind, given the amount of time they would take to arrive. Loeb argued that it takes a signal moving at the speed of light 24,000 years to get to the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, meaning that they’d have to wait 48,000 years to hear a response.

“The time that 3I/ATLAS spends inside the solar system is only 16,000 years,” he declared. “So there is not enough time for them to do anything if they want to ask something. So in general, interstellar trips are unlikely to benefit from communication.”

Nonetheless, Loeb ripped the team’s alleged slapdash approach, venting, “If they were motivated to find something, they won’t just look on December 18th and report nothing and make a press release and say there is nothing.”

“Instead of doing that, they would actually monitor it for months,” he added. “Most of the time that they can detect something, they would monitor it for a long period of time and then say, ‘Okay, we did our best. We looked.”

Loeb said he’s continuing to probe the latest ATLAS intel from the last couple months, claiming that there are at least 15 anomalies that scientists have yet to explain.