{"id":364307,"date":"2025-08-22T09:35:18","date_gmt":"2025-08-22T09:35:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/364307\/"},"modified":"2025-08-22T09:35:18","modified_gmt":"2025-08-22T09:35:18","slug":"comet-ufo-astronomers-puzzle-over-fastest-object-in-solar-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/364307\/","title":{"rendered":"Comet? UFO? Astronomers puzzle over fastest object in solar system"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just after midnight in a part of Planet Earth known as Massachusetts, a team of scientists who track comets and minor planets in the solar system announced that they had spotted something new: a spark in the southern sky, visible in the data they were getting from a telescope in Chile.<\/p>\n

The telescope, high in the Atacama Desert, is tasked with searching for objects that might collide with Earth. \u201cWe at the Minor Planet Center have the role to collect the information and also to post it quickly, almost in real time, on our website if the object is somehow interesting,\u201d said Peter Veres, a Harvard astronomer sometimes described as an air-traffic controller for the solar system.<\/p>\n

So at 1.15am local time on July 1, the discovery was announced. \u201cObservers around the world quickly gathered their telescopes,\u201d Veres said.<\/p>\n

\"Comet<\/p>\n

The possible comet 3I\/Atlas when it was discovered on July 1<\/p>\n

ATLAS\/UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII\/NASA<\/p>\n

Soon, astronomers concluded that the object had come from interstellar space, that it would not come within 170 million miles of Earth and that it was, in all likelihood, a sort of cosmic iceberg billions of years old, ejected from the frosty outer limits of another star system and now zipping along at 118,000 miles an hour, the fastest object ever sighted in our solar system.<\/p>\n

But there was also another theory that was soon being advanced by the Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb: that this object could be an alien probe, sent on a reconnaissance mission through our solar system on a course that kept it, deliberately, out of reach of our fastest rockets.<\/p>\n

It is only the third interstellar object ever recorded passing through the solar system. The first, that was named Oumuamua, was sighted in 2017. A second, 2I\/Borisov, was spotted in 2019 by a telescope maker in Crimea named Gennadiy Borisov. This latest visitor was sighted by a telescope run by Atlas, an early warning system funded by Nasathat is designed to detect asteroids heading towards Earth. It has been named 3I\/Atlas, the 3I standing for \u201c3 Interstellar\u201d.<\/p>\n

Loeb is recognised by fellow astronomers for his work on the evolution of the first stars, but he gained a global following in 2018 when he and a colleague published a paper suggesting that Oumuamua was a solar sail created by an alien civilisation, floating like driftwood through interstellar space, or perhaps even an alien probe dispatched on a scouting mission to our solar system.<\/p>\n

On July 2, 24 hours after Harvard\u2019s Minor Planets Center announced the sighting of 3I\/Atlas, Loeb woke at 2am to appear on a late-night radio show called Coast to Coast. After he got off air, \u201cone of the listeners wrote to me and said: \u2018There is a potential new object,\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Loeb began posting essays on the 3I\/Atlas. \u201cThey have received a quarter of a million views,\u201d he said. \u201cCan you believe it? It\u2019s not a TikTok video. These are essays of 1,000 words or more.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Portrait<\/p>\n

Avi Loeb, a Harvard University astrophysicist<\/p>\n

ANIBAL MARTEL\/ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n

Several things about 3I\/Atlas struck him as unusual. \u201cThere is no trail of dust,\u201d he said. Its trajectory lines up, to within five degrees, to the ecliptic plane, the orbital plane on which the Earth and most of the other planets in the solar system track around the sun, he added. \u201cThe chance of it being on that plane is one in 500.\u201d Its timing meant that it would come close to three planets: Jupiter, Mars and Venus. This, he said, \u201craises the question of whether this trajectory was designed\u201d.<\/p>\n

It would pass closest to the sun on October 29 but \u201cwe won\u2019t be able to observe it because the sun will be in the way\u201d, he said. \u201cIt\u2019s an interesting coincidence.\u201d Its speed is expected to increase, as it nears the sun, to about 152,000 miles per hour \u2014 and when you factor in the speed of the Earth, which is moving in the opposite direction around the sun, \u201cthat\u2019s three times faster than our fastest rockets\u201d, he said.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/p>\n

The 3I\/Atlas, an object from another solar system<\/p>\n

On a scale of one to ten, where ten represents a definite piece of alien technology, he still only gives it \u201ca four so far\u201d, he said. But he recently posted an essay on the Medium platform, asking what humanity should do \u201cif the new interstellar object 3I\/ATLAS is a spacecraft, guided to send mini-probes that will arrive at Earth and other planets in the coming months\u201d.<\/p>\n

He has a 15-point plan.<\/p>\n

One of his followers is already trading against the stock market, believing it will crash if the probe theory proves true, he said. Markets would crash \u201cbecause of the uncertainty\u201d, he said, adding: \u201cWe might feel like the Iranian air-defence system, when the B2 bombers were flying overhead and we can\u2019t do anything about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other astronomers think that the object is a comet: a fascinating thing to see but not proof, at last, that mankind is not alone in the universe. Loeb is \u201ca super bright guy\u201d, said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard\u2013Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He noted that Loeb had led Breakthrough Starshot, a project to send a probe to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri. \u201cThen when Oumuamua came in, he asked the very reasonable question: if one of my probes went through Alpha Centauri, wouldn\u2019t it look just like this? The answer turns out to be no.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oumuamua was long and flat. Veres, of the Minor Planets Center, said that it was \u201cinteresting because of its shape and its odd motion\u201d. It did not have the fuzzy halo of gas and dust that comets usually give off as they near the sun and heat up, and it seemed to accelerate in a manner that could not be accounted for \u201cpurely by gravity\u201d, Veres said. \u201cThat led to some, I would say speculative ideas by Professor Loeb \u2026 that it\u2019s a solar sail or probe.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 Scientists challenge theory that mystery object was alien ship<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

The second interstellar object to be spotted, Borisov, behaved more like a comet, Veres said. This third object was spotted when it was about 418 million miles from the sun. Its size is still hotly debated, though it is thought to be somewhere between 200 and 5,000 metres across, he said.<\/p>\n

Its trajectory, zipping through the solar system against the flow of the circling planets, is certainly interesting, but Veres notes that it is only the third such object ever spotted. \u201cThe previous two objects were on totally random angles,\u201d he said. Once 30 or 100 have been tracked, it will be easier to see what is ordinary for an interstellar comet, he said.<\/p>\n

But there are still unanswered questions. \u201cNow it\u2019s like, [260 million] miles from the sun. It\u2019s getting warmer \u2026 but it\u2019s still not very active,\u201d he said. \u201cThere is still no tail.\u201d This, he said, was \u201cfuel for those speculative ideas by Professor Loeb\u201d.<\/p>\n

Veres thinks that the lack of a halo of gas and dust might be because it has developed a hard crust as it crossed interstellar space and was \u201cbaked\u201d, though not in a warming sense, by cosmic rays. Perhaps as it nears the sun, this crust \u201cwill peel off and suddenly we\u2019ll see a lot of activity\u201d.<\/p>\n

John Forbes, a computational astronomer at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, believes that 3I\/Atlas does have a halo but that it is hard to see, because the comet is still travelling in our general direction. \u201cThe tail is pointing a little away from us,\u201d he said. \u201cFor my money, it\u2019s a really interesting object but it looks an awful lot like a comet.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Illustration<\/p>\n

The object will pass three planets while travelling too fast for our fastest rockets to reach it<\/p>\n

It has come from nearer the centre of the Milky Way, where there are stars formed billions of years before our sun. These older stars are composed of lighter elements, and have fewer metals in them, \u201cbecause metals themselves are produced by stars evolving and exploding\u201d, said Forbes.<\/p>\n

As stars form, a flat disc of dust and gas swirls around them and resolves into planets as well as lumps of ice and dust that get ejected into interstellar space. McDowell described 3I\/Atlas as an interstellar iceberg with a composition unlike any ice on Earth, \u201cwandering the galaxy for yonks\u201d and now, as it nears us, \u201cbarrelling along in a cloud of its own steam\u201d.<\/p>\n

Loeb thinks that whatever it is, its passage through our solar system represents a huge opportunity to get the general public excited about science. \u201cIt entered the outskirts of our solar system, the edge of the so-called Oort Cloud, 8,000 years ago,\u201d he said. \u201cThat was when humans started to document their history. It came within 1,000 times of the [distance between the Earth and the sun] 80 years ago.\u201d Eight years ago, it passed through the Kuiper Belt, just beyond the orbit of Neptune, he said. Now it is a speck in the heavens, moving steadily north across the night sky.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just after midnight in a part of Planet Earth known as Massachusetts, a team of scientists who track…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":364308,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3844],"tags":[70,413,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-364307","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-space","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115071741271179968","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=364307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364307\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/364308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=364307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=364307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=364307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}