Extreme TechNot An Alien, But Still Amazing: 3I/ATLAS Dazzles AstronomersGraham Templeton
Fri, November 21, 2025 at 4:15 PM EST
3 min read
A composite image of the hydrogen plume surrounding comet 3I/ATLAS. (Credit: NASA)It's official, if far too late for some people's liking: Interstellar object 3I/ATLAS is a comet. We already knew that, of course, but some on social media have taken the communications blackout caused by the recent government shutdown as an opportunity to imagine just about whatever they'd like.
What they'd like, it seems, is for 3I/ATLAS to be an alien spacecraft or some other piece of extraterrestrial technology. It's at least possible, since it is an interstellar object of some kind, and some people began pointing to various aspects of it to wish-cast an alien into existence.
The official NASA livestream is embedded below.
NASA had previously announced new images, likely to head off ongoing speculation about a cover-up of its true nature. It's frustrating that the public seems to need an extra reason to be interested in just the third interstellar object ever detected.
And despite the shutdown, NASA has managed to obtain quite a diverse set of imagery of the object so far. Not only has the agency spied it from Earth, but it's also collected imagery from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. They also managed to capture images of the comet as it passed behind the Sun from our perspective using the SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) satellite; a regular satellite would not have been able to spy it while looking directly into the Sun.
In all, NASA seems to have wrung a fair amount of imagery out of the short flyby, though it will of course take years to produce specific answers by combing through all the shots in all possible ways.
3I/ATLAS gif
Animated gif of images captured by the PUNCH mission, showing the object passing Mars. Credit: NASA/Southwest Research InstituteIt's good to have a more concrete basis for this discussion now. In the recent past, many came to believe they could discern a bulge on the Sun-facing side of the object, saying that this was unlikely to be a natural occurrence. In reality, it could be caused by any number of things, from a jet of interior material pushing its way out due to heat to a bulge in the rock core of the comet itself.
There were also certain interesting aspects of the tail, including its coloration, which are also easily explained by the comet's interstellar origin. As noted above, it will take some time to identify all of these exotic materials, but there's currently no reason to assume that they're unnatural in origin.
These are all intriguing aspects of the comet and are in need of further study, but none imply an alien origin. Of course, some will never agree; the whole movement is really sustained by Harvard astrophysicist and modern-day physics pariah Avi Loeb, who has already taken to his blog to claim that the NASA press conference was "deceptive."
For the record, none of his colleagues in physics seem to agree. And, for the record, neither do I. When you see headlines like "There is Nothing More Deceptive than an Obvious Fact," you should already know there's something fishy going on after the jump.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/not-alien-still-amazing-3i-211526840.html
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