Alien spaceship or just a rock? Scientific study suggests this space object could be an alien ship

A newly discovered object—named 3I/ATLAS—has hurtled into our Solar System, stirring curiosity among the scientific community. This cosmic visitor, right now too distant for detailed observation, has dazzled astronomers with its strange behaviour.

Rather than being dismissed as a typical asteroid or comet, it caught the attention of controversial Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who proposed a provocative idea: what if this interstellar rock isn’t a rock at all, but a disguised alien probe?

Loeb and his colleagues devised a conceptual exercise grounded in what philosophers call the “dark forest” idea, which suggests intelligent civilisations hide their traces in a hostile universe.

Could 3I/ATLAS be alien tech?

If we give Loeb the benefit of the doubt, some features of the object are indeed eyebrow-raising. Its orbit is retrograde, moving contrary to the usual flow of Solar System bodies, yet aligned closely with the plane of Earth’s orbit. Loeb places the odds of this coincidence at a slim 2%. Its trajectory also takes it unusually close to Venus, Mars, Jupiter at oddly specific points in their orbits.

Then there’s its appearance. Though around 20 km across, 3I/ATLAS appears unusually bright. Observations from a powerful instruments failed to detect the telltale gas emissions typical of comets, suggesting it might not be one.

However, this is all speculation from Loeb, whose thought experiments are nothing other than that: nice ideas.

“By far, the most likely outcome will be that 3I/ATLAS is a completely natural interstellar object, probably a comet, and we await the astronomical data to support this likely origin,” admitted Loeb. “Nevertheless, when viewed from an open-minded and unprejudiced perspective, our paper includes many compelling insights that could be applied to tens of interstellar objects that are expected to be detected over the next decade.” NASA later confirmed the object to indeed be a comet, saying that “Astronomers have categorised this object as interstellar because of the hyperbolic shape of its orbital path.”

We’ll find out soon enough. “On October 3, 2025,” writes Loeb in his blog, “the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS will pass within a distance of 29 million kilometres from Mars” which the the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will be able to image. From there, we’ll know for sure if this is a comet, or something else...

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