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Q&A Before Closest Approach of 3I/ATLAS to Earth

Avi Loeb Medium

By Avi Loeb Medium
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Image of 3I/ATLAS on November 24, 2025 at 1:58 UTC from a 12-inch telescope in Namibia. North is to the right and the sunward direction is towards the upper left. The field of view is 75 by 100 arcminutes, corresponding to 6.6 by 8.8 million kilometers. The blue glow at the bottom right corner of the image is caused by the triple star system Eta Virginis. (Image Credit: Gerald Rhemann and Michael Jäger)

Below is a Q&A list that combines questions from various reporters about the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, a week before its closest approach to Earth:

Q: How can a space probe hypothetically resemble a comet? Break it down for us like a 5th grader.

A: A comet is identified as an object that sheds dust and gas as a result of the illumination of pockets of ice on its surface by sunlight. While shedding mass in a preferred direction, it recoils in the opposite direction similarly to a rocket. This gives rise to a non-gravitational acceleration.

A spacecraft could also collect ice and dust on its surface as a result of its motion through dense gas clouds in interstellar space. In addition, it could gain a non-gravitational acceleration as a result of a propulsion system. Given these features, it may resemble a comet in unresolved images like the ones we have of 3I/ATLAS. However, a spacecraft could also display artificial lights, release excess heat from its engine or maneuver in unusual ways.

Q: Why are some scientists pushing back against any discussion on the conjecture that the anomalies of an interstellar object might be technological signatures?

A: The foundation of science is based on the humility to learn, not the arrogance of expertise. When comet experts argued that the interstellar object 3I/ ATLAS must be a familiar water-rich comet as soon as it was discovered in July, they behaved like artificial intelligence systems: only able to reflect the data sets they were trained on. For decades, the data set that established comet expertise largely comprised icy rocks in the solar system. My counterpoint is simple: humanity launched technological objects into space, so we must conclude that alien life forms could do the same. This possibility must be added to the training data set of comet experts when studying interstellar objects.

To illustrate why, consider the following: on 2 January 2025, the Minor Planet Center — officiated by the International Astronomical Union to catalogue space objects — identified a ‘near-Earth asteroid’. A day later, the officials realized that this ‘asteroid’ was following the same trajectory of the Tesla Roadster launched by Elon Musk’s SpaceX in 2018. They immediately removed the object from their asteroid catalogue, realizing that it was not in fact a rock but a car. Musk, statistically, is not the most accomplished space entrepreneur in the Milky Way over the past 13.8 billion years. There are about a hundred billion stars with similar properties to the Sun in the Milky Way; roughly a tenth of them host a habitable Earth-size planet. If you roll the dice on billions of Earth-sun analogues, surely you would — or at least could — find other space entrepreneurs on some exoplanets? There is no reason why 3I/ATLAS is not a ship launched from one of them.

Most stars are billions of years older than the Sun. Our Voyager spacecraft, with its 1970s technology, can reach the opposite side of the galaxy over the course of a billion years. This implies that there has been plenty of time for interstellar artefacts, potentially more advanced than Voyager or the Tesla Roadster, to reach our solar system from interstellar space. But would comet experts recognize these visitors as technological artefacts if their training data set includes only icy rocks? I do not believe so.

Q: Can you summarize the main anomalies of 3I/ATLAS?

Let’s look at the evidence. I have identified the following main anomalies of 3I/ATLAS:

Its trajectory opposite to the direction of motion of the planets is aligned to within five degrees with the ecliptic plane of the planets around the Sun, with a likelihood of 0.2 percent. This suggests that it may have been designed to do this.

It arrived from a direction coincident with the enigmatic “Wow! Signal” to within 9 degrees. The chance of that happening at random is 0.6 percent.

Before and after perihelion, it displayed a sunward jet (anti- tail) that is not an optical illusion from geometric perspective, unlike familiar comets. This might be a technological signature.

Its arrival time was fine-tuned to bring it within tens of millions of kilometers from Mars, Venus and Jupiter and be unobservable from Earth at perihelion (when an object is closest to the Sun), with a likelihood of 0.005 percent. The forecasted perijove distance of 3I/ATLAS during its encounter with Jupiter on March 16, 2026 is 53.6 million kilometers, nearly identical to Jupiter’s Hill radius, 53.5 million kilometers. This rare coincidence might mean that 3I/ATLAS intends to release technological devices as artificial satellites of Jupiter, potentially at Jupiter’s Lagrange points — where orbital corrections and fuel requirements are minimal.

The nucleus of 3I/ATLAS is several orders of magnitude times more massive than 1I/`Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov, while moving faster than both. There is not enough rocky material in interstellar space to deliver a rock of this mass once per decade to the inner solar system. This suggests that 3I/ATLAS may have targeted the inner solar system rather than was drawn at random from the reservoir of interstellar rocks.

Its gas plume contains much more nickel than iron (as found in industrially produced nickel alloys) and a nickel to cyanide ratio that is orders of magnitude larger than that of all known comets, with a likelihood below 1 percent. This may be a signature of industrial production of its surface material.

It exhibits jets in the direction of the sun and opposite to it, which requires an unreasonably large surface area in order to absorb enough sunlight to sublimate enough ice to feed the mass flux of these jets. Perhaps the jets originate from technological thrusters.

Near perihelion it exhibited non-gravitational acceleration. Perhaps this acceleration was produced by an engine.

Its tightly collimated jets maintain orientation across a million kilometers in multiple directions relative to the sun. This might imply that they are used for navigation or associated with the release of mini probes from a mothership.

Q: Why should science consider the technological origin of interstellar objects?

A: If 3I/ATLAS is technological, it could pose a threat to humanity. We do not have a response protocol for alien technology, but after the first encounter — as long as we survive it — there will be political will to invest trillions of dollars in a warning system of interceptors that take close-up photos of anomalous interstellar objects. 3I/ATLAS is expected to arrive closest to Earth in a week, on December 19, 2025. Let us hope that we will not get unwanted gifts for the holidays.

In ignoring these anomalies, comet experts miss two important opportunities.

First, science needs to be viewed as a continuous process rather than as a finished product. Collecting evidence is a learning experience akin to the work of a detective. It sometimes unravels a sobering truth that was not anticipated, since nature is more imaginative than we are. This was certainly the case when quantum mechanics was discovered a century ago and revealed a physical reality that was counterintuitive to Albert Einstein’s findings.

Despite lessons from history, present-day scientists minimize the risk to their reputation by not sharing error-corrections from data and conversing with the public only once they know the final answer. In this risk-averse intellectual climate, they inform the public of their final findings in press conferences, where they behave like lecturers in the classroom. The audience is made aware of what it needs to know. By minimizing the risk to their reputation, scientists promote the impression that science is an occupation of the intellectual elite.

The truth is that the mainstream of science is routinely wrong. Albert Einstein argued between 1935 and 1940 that black holes or gravitational waves do not exist. The popular idea of supersymmetry was ruled out by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. In addition, after four decades of occupying center stage in mainstream theoretical physics, string theory is no closer to making unique predictions that can be tested experimentally.

Science is a work in progress. Anomalies offer a multitude of interpretations that are tested by new data that can rule out all but one of them.

Second, the mainstream defined the search for microbes as the highest priority in the 2020 U.S. Decadal Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics, converging on the allocation of more than 10 billion dollars to the Habitable World Observatory and sidelining the search for technological signatures. Even if microbes are far more abundant on exoplanets, it might be easier to identify technological signatures. It therefore makes most sense to hedge our bets and invest billions of dollars in the simultaneous search for both technological and primitive life forms.

The public is much more passionate about the search for aliens than the search for microbes. Taxpayers fund science and scientists should not sideline the public’s interest when defining research priorities. I receive hundreds of emails from fans every day and many parents write that their children wish to become scientists after seeing me speak in podcasts or on television.

Q: You dubbed the perihelion of 3I/ATLAS as a probable ‘black swan’ event. What are your thoughts on its closest flyby to Earth?

A: 3I/ATLAS will pass closest to Earth on December 19, 2025. Fortunately, this date coincides with a new moon when the view of the sky will not be contaminated by moonlight, making it an ideal observing night for Earth-based telescopes. My hope is that we will gain new insights into the nature of 3I/ATLAS at that time thanks to data from hundreds of observatories, including the Hubble and Webb space telescopes.

In particular, spectrographs on large telescopes can measure the speed and composition of the outflowing material in the jets of 3I/ATLAS. If these jets originate from pockets of ice on the surface of a rock, then their thermal speed would be smaller than a few hundreds of meters per second. This speed is much smaller than expected from technological thrusters.

Q: Can we possibly deduce a connection between the surge in solar flares and 3I/ATLAS? Would that be speculative sci-fi?

A: It is unlikely that the surge in solar flares is connected to 3I/ATLAS. However, our imagination is mostly limited by the technologies we possess.

Q: What is the best evidence so far that suggests we are probably not alone in the universe?

A: It is arrogant to believe that we are alone in the Milky-Way because it contains 100 billion stars. Since we emerged from a soup of chemicals which is common on habitable Earth-mass planets, common sense suggests that the galaxy is teaming with life.

Q: What is the current status of the study on the interstellar meteor IM1?

A: We are currently analyzing the chemical and isotopic composition of the materials collected from the fireball site of the interstellar meteor IM1, and have preliminary evidence for a composition that originated outside the solar system. More details about our results will be made public in spring 2026.

Q: Are you into comics? If so, which ones are your favorite heroes/villains, etc.?

A: No, I am not.

Q: And why?

A: I do not have time for that. I focus on studying physical reality with the best scientific tools that I have access to.

Q: Have you watched Stranger Things? or similar supernatural / sci-fi series? Your remarks.

A: No, I enjoy science fact, not science fiction.

Q: Growing up, what fascinated you to pick up astronomy?

A: It was forced upon me by circumstances. In 1988 I was offered a 5-year fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton — where Albert Einstein was faculty three decades earlier, under the condition that I will work on astrophysics.

Q: Why is the new frontier of interstellar objects exciting?

A: Remarkably, interstellar objects offer a new opportunity for both the search for primitive and technological lifeforms. We can land on an interstellar rock and return a sample of it to Earth. The returned sample may reveal the building blocks of life from another star. But if the interstellar object happens to be a technological artefact, our learning opportunities would be far greater. The fundamental question after landing on a spacecraft with buttons on its surface would be whether to press any of them.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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(Image Credit: Chris Michel, National Academy of Sciences, 2023)

Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.

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