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... 3I/ATLAS breaking records
3I/ATLAS appeared to be travelling at 245,000 kilometres per hour, making it the fastest object ever detected in our Solar System.
It was also huge. Early estimates suggest the object could be up to 20 km in size. Finally, scientists believe it may even be older than our Sun.
Could it be alien?
Our first assumption when we see something in space is that it's a lump of rock or ice. But the strange properties of 3I/ATLAS have suggested to some that it may be something else entirely.
Harvard astrophysics professor Avi Loeb and colleagues last week uploaded a paper titled Is the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Alien Technology? to the arXiv preprint server. (The paper has not yet been peer reviewed.)
Loeb is a controversial figure among astronomers and astrophysicists. He has previously suggested that the first known interstellar object, 1I/Oumuamua, discovered in 2017, may also have been an alien craft.
Among other oddities Loeb suggests may be signs of deliberate alien origin, he notes the orbit of 3I/ATLAS takes it improbably close to Venus, Mars, and Jupiter. ...
