3I/Atlas: The Increasingly Weird Interstellar Visitor
This latest interstellar visitor is looking pretty weird. In fact, the closer it gets the weirder it gets. Is it some sort of spacecraft? I wouldn't be too surprised at this point.
This is a summary of the basic weirdness and an explanation, but you might also want to visit this article, and this video; they're pretty thorough.
Dr. Ari Loeb: https://avi-loeb.medium.com/is-the-interstellar-object-3i-atlas-alien-technology-b59ccc17b2e3
@WhatLurksBeneath: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExzqklYYm6A
So it's come to my attention that a surprising number of you haven't been paying attention to the interstellar visitor that's entered our solar system, 3i Atlas.
Maybe it's nothing.
Could be nothing.
It's a very weird and interesting nothing, even if it is just a nothing.
But in case it's something, I figured I'd give you folks a rundown of some of the weirder aspects of what this thing is.
Now I should start off saying that most of this information that I'm going to be talking about comes from Professor Ari Avi Loeb of Harvard University.
Link down to his article below.
But a lot more has come out since that time.
And the closer this thing gets, the weirder it gets.
So let's talk about the 3i designation, 3i Atlas.
Henceforth, I'm just going to be calling it Atlas, since that's its name.
The 3i is the designation for third interstellar object.
In other words, this is not something from the Oort cloud.
This is not a regular returning meteor.
This is something foreign.
The first interstellar object was Umuamua back in 2017.
Now, it came from the Vega system.
Or it came from the direction of Vega, more or less.
All three of these objects, they're kind of from the same quadrant of the night sky, but they look like they're coming from very different places.
Umwamua was kind of weird.
It was a weird, it was a cylindrical object.
Not really what we were expecting.
Not a typical rogue asteroid.
Some people at the time were pointing out that something like this could be an interstellar probe.
Right?
If you're going to scout out a system before you arrive, maybe toss one in a hyperbolic arc.
Never gets too close to any of the planets, but you can take some pictures, kind of get a bird's eye view of what's going on there.
Maybe.
It was kind of weird.
The second interstellar object was Borislav back in 2019, coming from Cassiopeia.
By all indications, just a rogue asteroid.
Nothing too weird about it, aside from the fact that it's interstellar, and if you're a big nerd, there's a lot that's interesting about it.
But this third one, Atlas, from the Sagittarius constellation.
Although currently, at the recording of this video, it's, you know, if you could see, you can't because it's too bright, but it's almost directly in between Venus and the Sun in the constellation of Virgo.
You know, I have a telescope.
I should have got a picture of it back when it was visible.
But it didn't even occur to me.
And now it's past the solar horizon where we can't see it anymore.
Now, what's weird about this thing?
Well, first of all, it's probably about 20 kilometers in diameter.
And Umwamwa was considered really weird because it was two kilometers, which is huge.
To find one 20 kilometer, we should see about 1 million 2 kilometer or smaller interstellar objects.
And we've only seen three.
Three confirmed interstellar objects that we found.
And one of them is a one in a million size.
So that is, that is pretty weird.
It's also approaching at only five degrees off of our ecliptic plane, which that means the planets all rotate about the sun on the ecliptic plane.
Now that the solar ecliptic is not the same as the galactic ecliptic, if you look up in the night sky and you're away from city lights, you can make out the milky way, the.
The milky way is our galaxy.
It's the cluster of stars that make a line up through the sky, so our ecliptic is significantly different from that.
Every solar system is going to have its own ecliptic and this thing's this thing's approaching at only five degrees off of ours so, of all the angles it could have come, it's it's slicing the pie beautifully.
It's another weird thing.
This thing entered what you could call our solar system's territory 8,000 years ago, right around when we started recording history.
As far as we know, according to current theories, Goplepe Tepe might disagree with that, but we'll go with the civilization started in 4,000 BC.
Okay, that's about when it entered our, our solar system, the outer limits of the Uort cloud, which is a hundred thousand AU away.
The Uort cloud is 2,000 to 100,000 AU and I'm gonna be a little bit fuzzy on this one, but that's about two lightly, two light years just close to that, about halfway to the next star.
So maybe calling that our territory is a bit of an exaggeration, but this, this thing, has been coming for a really long time, but we couldn't see it until the absolute last minute because it was coming from the galactic core, from from the region of the galactic core.
In fact, later estimates show that this thing might be billions of years old.
This thing might be older than our solar system.
It's a not just a traveler from deep space, it's a traveler from deep time, at least if our reverse trajectories on it are correct.
So yeah, we could have landed a probe on it if we had spotted it one year earlier, but we didn't.
It's too late.
There's not enough time to launch a probe to go look at the thing close up.
It's just going to rocket through the system and we've got to look at it with what we have.
Next, it's hitting perihelion, which is, perihelion is the top of the arc.
When it's doing a, when it's going to orbit around the sun and then leave, perihelion is happening opposite from us.
So we won't be able to see what happens at perihelion.
Which is, this is where we start getting into the really crazy parts, okay?
It's called a reverse Oberth maneuver.
Did I say that right?
Yeah, it's at perihelion.
When you're in a gravitational well, you're going like this.
If you want to orbit, that's the ideal place to hit your rockets to slow down.
And they would need a delta V of 20 kilometers a second to do that.
To slow down and get into orbit of Earth or Jupiter.
About 20 kilometers a second.
Which we can't survive 20 kilometers a second of delta V, but we can build things that do 20 kilometers a second.
Missile rockets do that.
Intercontinental ballistic missiles do that.
So that's totally feasible technology.
What else?
It, um...
If it were to launch, if it were to launch a probe at Pluto, Venus, Mars, or Jupiter, five meters, no, sorry, five kilometers a second of delta V, which is, again, something we can accomplish.
Then there's the distance.
It's coming by Pluto, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter.
Super close.
Okay, Pluto, 5.1 AU.
I should clarify.
An astronomical unit is the distance, the average distance from Earth to the Sun.
So it's about seven light minutes.
Pluto, it's coming within 5.1 AU.
Venus, it's buzzing it by 0.65 AU.
Mars is 0.19 AU.
So it went super close by Mars.
The Mars rover actually got pictures of it.
And Jupiter, 0.36.
And just to give you an idea of scale, Jupiter is 5 AU from the Sun.
So 5 times as far as we are.
And the beginning of the Oort cloud is 2000 AU.
Space is really, really big.
Now, there was some discussion from Professor Loeb that it might be a solar sail.
The thing that we're looking at could be a solar sail.
Which would be the ideal way to slow down.
Slow down and then come into orbit of Earth or Jupiter.
I mean, if you needed some hydrogen, Jupiter would be a good place to set up a base.
Who knows?
I think that's that theory's been debunked because Because, well, here's another really weird thing about it.
So, first of all, it started outgassing CO2.
First, there was one plume, and then there were plumes on both sides.
After that, it started outgassing cyanide, which is why it's green right now.
And yet, the outgassing has not affected its velocity.
So, if it was a solar sail, it should have been slowing down.
I don't believe it has been slowing down.
Even though these things usually do slow down when they start outgassing.
So, either there's something else accelerating it, or it's incredibly massive, and what little outgassing there is isn't enough to slow it down.
I mentioned also that the Mars probe, the Mars rover, managed to take some photos of it.
Now, there's two cameras on the Mars rover.
One is designed for looking at space, the other isn't.
They only publish the ones that weren't designed for looking at space.
So, we've got a streak in the sky, is all that we have of it.
They've had the other photos for weeks, and they haven't published them.
The only photos we have have been where it's a blip in the distance with maybe a halo around it, and maybe a couple of plumes from the outgassing.
Which is, outgassing is when an object hits the solar wind, it heats it up, and frozen frozen things that we call gases, like CO2, sublimate, and they spray off.
They go from solid to gas.
And there's finally two last things that are really, really weird.
I'm sure that most of you know about SETI, but I'll cover it briefly: the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
SETI is a giant radar telescope scanning the heavens for anything weird, anything noticeable, prime numbers in sequence, for example.
And the WOW signal was back in 1977, I think.
They detected a sudden burst of radio frequency.
And the guy that was checking the report the next day wrote WOW next to it.
So that's the name of the WOW signal.
Because it was like, whoa, that was something.
But what was it?
The cynical view would say it was probably a spy satellite.
American, Russian.
The radio telescope just happened to catch one of our own spy satellites that the government won't admit to.
However, this WOW signal came from the course that Atlas was on.
And there have been other reports by amateur astronomers that they've been detecting bursts of radio information from this thing.
Some of them going so far as saying they are detecting repeating patterns of prime numbers.
The reason that's significant is that repeating patterns of prime numbers don't appear in nature.
It's something a mathematically aware species would create to signal its intention to communicate.
And this thing has basically disappeared.
It's off our sensors right now.
You know, some of the more advanced satellites can still track it, but you can't see it with a telescope anymore because it's too close to the sun.
It drops below the horizon before the sun does.
At least up where I'm living.
I'm not such an expert at astronomy that I could say the same for where you are.
And it's going to disappear until late December.
And if it's coming to Earth, if it's doing a hard break on the other side, well, we could expect it by about March or so.
NASA's claiming they haven't published the photos because the government shut down.
Yeah, maybe.
Other people are worried about Project Bluebeam, uh, Project Bluebeam being a... a...
I don't like using conspiracy theory.
After all, that's a phrase invented by the CIA.
But the essence of it is that they use advanced holographic technology that, who knows how it works, but they create a simulation of an alien invasion or the second coming of Christ or giant squid hits New York City to control and corral the population, maybe.
Is this that?
Well, it's not just NASA talking about it.
A lot of amateurs are seeing it as well.
And Professor Loeb talking about it potentially being an alien craft is, well, I mean, I don't know the guy's whole resume.
He seems, at first blush, to be one of those crazy intellectuals that loves exploring weird ideas.
He's not saying it is an alien craft.
just saying you know if there was an alien craft it would look a lot like this and if it is an alien craft that's been well by all indications I must fit suddenly it must fit warped here and put on a cloaking device it's been traveling for thousands of years
It's been traveling for longer than, well, I don't know how long we've been around.
All indications are Atlantis was a real place, probably a Bronze Age level civilization that when the when the what do they call it?
Doesn't matter.
When the end of the ice age occurred, Atlantis collapsed, and the refugees went lots of places, leaving legends of these water people that taught civilization.
Kobliki Tepe was likely built by the descendants of Atlantis.
At least that's a very educated guess based upon what very little data we have.
What very little data we have shows that the standard model of nothing but hunter-gatherers and then Ur and Babylon are built is completely incorrect.
Gobleckite Tepe completely throws that on its head.
Does not fit that model at all.
So I'm on the Atlanta side.
Who knows?
Maybe we had flying cars 50,000 years ago.
Or maybe this is just something from the very early days of our galaxy, let alone our universe.
Actually, it wouldn't be that early in the universe, but it'd be early for our galaxy.
What if this is some sort of proto-matter composed of different combinations of elements than we expect to find in a late object?
I don't know, man.
That's still pretty darned interesting.
Or maybe it is some sort of generation sleeper ship that looked into the distance, saw a habitable planet.
It could see from the oxygen in the atmosphere anytime our planet transited the sun that there's life on that planet.
Not intelligent life, not that they knew, but life.
Maybe they're going to be just as surprised as us when they made a technological civilization.
Lots of things could get spicy.
I got a feeling 2026 is going to be a far-out year.
