7 ms·
Interstellar Object 3I/Atlas Passed Mars Last Night
- pelagicAustral 1y agoWas it glowing green?
- ares623 1y agoUlaaaaa!
- suprnurd 1y agoLooking forward to seeing what images they received, especially after Avi Loeb's comments on it.
- ares623 1y agoAvi’s the new “it’s Aliens” meme guy
- zikzak 1y agoNo, he's the new "we should consider what this would look like if it were an artifact of an alien civilization" guy. You know, open minded. He's also a well respected and very accomplished person who has acknowledged this is a comet. If it happens to slow down and change trajectory after it passes behind the sun, he might change his tune but he's pretty focused on the science at this point.
- ceejayoz 1y agoHe was well respected. As the saying goes, open your mind too far and it falls out of the cranium.
- zikzak 1y agoUm, ok. I think he's still doing ok and his fellow academics would prefer he didn't openly speculate about pet theories. They think it is embarrassing. But ask yourself where we'd be if noone ever asked what if. There's a reason he called his project to observe anomalous phenomenon The Galileo Project. Ring a bell?
- ares623 1y agoDidn’t Galileo collect evidence first?
- ceejayoz 1y ago> There's a reason he called his project to observe anomalous phenomenon The Galileo Project. Ring a bell? Sure, like the Patriot Act was about patriotism.
- alganet 1y ago"What if it's an alien artifact?" - We're going to observe it. "What if it's a natural object?" - We're going to observe it. That's it. It's all we can reasonably do for now. It changes nothing.
- exe34 1y agoVery little observing involves just the eyes. much of what we observe relies on millennia of assumptions. if we don't consider alternatives that we would normally reject out of hand, we can miss things.
- phyzome 1y agoLast I checked, he was making claims well beyond that.
- xorbax 1y ago"What if 3I/Atlas is responsible for the Wow! Signal?!" is one of the sillier ones He's definitely turned into a "I'm just asking questions and keeping an open mind" kinda grifter, whatever his past qualifications and respectability
- bsdetector 1y agoSeems reasonable that an alien craft travelling between stars might want to illuminate the whole star system to detect dark objects and plot a safe or more perfect course. Apparently Wow! came from the same area and seemingly was blue-shifted by an amount that could make sense from an approaching craft, so that doesn't sound that silly to me. Unlikely to be the real cause, not silly.
- xorbax 1y agoHow is it "illuminating the whole star system"? It seems more likely that it'll act like a non intelligent hunk of rock going through some random trajectory. It's less silly to declare you'll win the lottery. That has happened many times over - but we're yet to discover that can or has existed outside of Earth. While it's nearly impossible it hasn't happened several times over, it's so far impossible that we've encountered even the crumbiest excuse for life. I assert that it is silly. We're not indigenous American happening upon European settlers. We're indigenous Americans wandering about the continent harassing mammoths, inventing stories of how it'll go when it happens.
- bsdetector 1y agoA ship approaching a sun will see the objects on the far side illuminated fully, but objects on the near side will be illuminated only on a thin edge, like a crescent moon, because they're looking at the 'back' side of the objects. By sending out a pulse of light they could not just light up the ship-facing side of objects but also determine their precise location and velocity. Seems like something you'd want to do to not waste your thousand-year mission by accidentally colliding with a dark object. The Wow! signal could be just such an event. Aliens might use some type of scanning beam rather than a big flash, but I doubt we have the 1977 data to differentiate between a beam scanning our area and a solar-system-wide flash.
- ReptileMan 1y agoI am open minded, but Arthur Clarke solved it. If it was alien it would have slingshotted around the sun. Unless it is on collision course with a planet or using the sun to modify its course towards another star - you can assume that it is not alien and functioning.
- DennisP 1y agoFwiw, Avi's hypothesis for Oumuamua was not that it was functioning, but that it was old, defunct light sail.
- 827a 1y agoWell, you know what they say; don't be so open-minded that your brain falls out.
- keepamovin 1y agoNonsense. Open minded means not precluding possibilities based on irrational bias, which would only increases intelligence.
- 827a 1y agoSure, if the biases are actually irrational, but in this case the biases are things like "idk maybe we should follow the scientific method", while Loeb pushes "here's an idea that is unfalsifiable and untestable, but look its peer reviewed and its on a harvard domain name so you have to pay attention to me". Loeb is, to be very clear: unintelligent and unscientific. He has no desire to actually test the theories he publishes, and because of that, most of the theories are literally untestable. He just wants to shit-publish wild ideas, which is totally fine, if we were talking about a blog or something of that similar caliber. But that would not attract the $$$ views he demands to afford his lifestyle.
- antonvs 1y agoHis Galileo Project is explicitly looking for “extraterrestrial technological signatures”, and he’s just using any opportunity for hype about that. He got attention for writing about this for Oumuamua, and now he’s just rinsing and repeating for 3I/Atlas. It’s exactly like any youtuber chasing the most effective clickbait. It’s like when Altman talks about AIs building a Dyson sphere. Everyone with any understanding of the issues knows it’s self-serving hype.
- efavdb 1y agoHere's an interview of his on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf0xB3EtQX0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf0xB3EtQX0
- Perenti 1y agoI had dinner with one of the co-authors Wednesday night. He's doubling down on the "significance" test that has H0 that all possible incoming trajectories are equally likely. He's convinced it's an essentially a local phenomenon. I look forward to how he spins this paper.
- dostick 1y ago> 3I/ATLAS is thought to have been drifting through interstellar space for many billions of years before encountering our solar system. It is hard to believe, but it means it’s been a fiery comet for billions of years, how is that possible that it havent burned up…
- blacksmith_tb 1y agoWell nothing much in hard vacuum is "fiery" - comets in our solar system do get ablated by the solar wind as they orbit the sun more closely; I assume in this case the majority of those billions of years were in deep space where there wasn't much pushing/pulling mass off.
- motoboi 1y agoYeah but then it wouldn’t be drifting would it? Joke explanation: a drifting vehicle is burning tires and leaving a cloud of smoke behind, like a comet.
- grues-dinner 1y agoWhether it's drifting through space or hammering through at dozens of kilometres a second is rather a matter of perspective. Perhaps as far as it's concerned, its sedate drift has been interrupted by a very ill-mannered solar system making a reckless close pass.
- lazide 1y agoYes, the solar system is moving (rotating) relative to the galactic core at 230 KM/s, far faster than this object is moving relative to us. Depending on its origin/history, it’s getting run over by a runaway train, or taking a sedate walk.
- mrexroad 1y agoTangentially, I enjoy reminding my kids how long it takes our star to complete a rotation around the Milky Way, and then also point out that we can go to a museum and see fossils of what life looked like one galactic rotation ago. It gives the right amount of backward and forward perspective about the rock we live on that I want them to keep tucked away in the corner of their mind.
- TMWNN 1y agoI was surprised to recently learn that NASA has aimed pretty much everything it has at 3I/Atlas, even the Perseverance Mars rover! <https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/comets/3i-atlas/ https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/comets/3i-atlas/>
- dweekly 1y agoGenuinely curious: what could the Mars rover possibly capture about this object that other instruments cannot? Is it our highest resolution imagery in the vicinity of Mars?
- exe34 1y agomy favourite sci-fi idea about this is that the aliens know we love shiny things so they give us a comet to look at while they have their annual picnic somewhere nearby.
- exitb 1y agoWhen you look at images of the comet Siding Spring made from Mars surface and orbit, it’s clear that neither of the instruments are really well suited for that type of observation. In such case, you just use everything you have and hope for the best.
- philbo 1y agoNot much, but just confirmation that it's in the expected part of the sky is quite exciting. There's a probable capture of it from Perseverance here (it's just a tiny faint smudge): https://bsky.app/profile/stim3on.bsky.social/post/3m2aqnbwlwk26 https://bsky.app/profile/stim3on.bsky.social/post/3m2aqnbwlw...
- Razengan 1y ago> just confirmation that it's in the expected part of the sky is quite exciting It would be funny if it behaves "as expected" when in the range of our instruments, but not when it thinks we can't see it :)
- Marsk 1y agohttps://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/comets/3i-atlas/ https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/comets/3i-atlas/ interesting blurb at the top of the site... "Due to the lapse in federal government funding, NASA is not updating this website."
- preisschild 1y agoat least it's not saying "thanks to the radical left democrats" like other govt websites
- CamperBob2 1y agoLooks like you were downvoted by someone who either thought you were kidding, thought you were posting false partisan flamebait, or thinks that the language used by the Trump administration is just peachy keen. Regardless, they were wrong. https://abc7.com/post/government-websites-displaying-messages-blaming-democrats-shutdown/17918723/ https://abc7.com/post/government-websites-displaying-message...
- svachalek 1y agohttps://www.hud.gov/ https://www.hud.gov/
- CamperBob2 1y agoGood lord. That's worse than I'd heard. We're pretty much hosed.
- reaperducer 1y agoSome departments have even added similar language to employees' e-mail out-of-office messages.
- mystraline 1y agoThats correct. Some groups have. More groups refuse to break the Hatch Act and take partisan sides. Theres a LOT of people who work for the government that want to do a good job, and faithfully keep doing what they're paid to do. Administrations dont matter. The mission does. And that mission goes year by year. Well, until now.
- dnw 1y agoHave we gotten better at detecting these objects in the past 5 years or is the solar system going through a bumpy area of Milky Way lately? We have observed (or I have heard about) many interstellar objects in the past five years than any previous times.
- bravoetch 1y agoFrom wikipedia: "As of 2025, three interstellar objects have been discovered traveling through the Solar System: 1I/ʻOumuamua in 2017, 2I/Borisov in 2019, and 3I/ATLAS in 2025" I would guess that observation improves over time. The wikipedia article is fascinating, estimating 10,000 such objects passing within Neptune's orbit in our solar system each day. I think that includes dust and sand sized objects.
- eugenekay 1y agoComputing Power has increased tremendously, along with the higher resolution of digital imaging technology compared to analog film plates. Sky Survey projects like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory have become active in recent years, which generate Terabytes of spectrographic data each night which can be rapidly examined for differences from previous captures. In the past each exposure had to be hand-aligned on a Light table and “flipped” between to spot differences.
- throwup238 1y agoThere has been a significant increase in NEO observation projects in the last eight years and there’s one coming online soon that should increase the detection capabilities even more. Pan-STARRS (discovered 1I/ʻOumuamua), Zwicky Transient Facility (2I/Borisov), and ATLAS (3I/ATLAS) are the major existing projects and the Rubin Observatory/LSST will be a huge upgrade. We’re going to detect a lot more if these objects, especially since a lot of the work of the projects are looking at historical data.
- coolspot 1y ago2I/Borisov was not discovered by Zwicky Transient Facility . The comet was discovered on 30 August 2019 by amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov at his personal observatory MARGO in Nauchnij, Crimea, using a 0.65 meter telescope he designed and built himself.
- baggy_trough 1y agoHow likely is it that a random object from outside the solar system would pass so closely by Mars and Jupiter?
- grues-dinner 1y agoHow likely is it that a random alien object does a wellness check on a barren planet in the same decade the humans happen to turn on the big survey telescope array?
- baggy_trough 1y agoPretty likely if there are a lot of them!
- grues-dinner 1y agoThen I guess we'll see another one soon (unless we freak them out by noticing them and broadcasting about it!). Once more survey telescopes like Nancy Grace Roman and Xuntian come online we'll increasingly find out how many there really are and I suppose if they seem to like buzzing the proverbial tower.
- 827a 1y agoIn fact, we already have; that's why there's a 3 in its name.
- grues-dinner 1y agoThe other two didn't make a planetary close pass. As we see more of them, the statistical strangeness of the third one getting so close to Mars will fade. (Or, I suppose, they keep doing it and then we really will have a puzzle on our hands!)
- ceejayoz 1y agoShuffle a deck of cards, and statistically no one has ever shuffled the same sequence in all of human history. It is extraordinarily unlikely you will shuffle one particular order of cards. It is 100% likely you will result in a sequence of cards. Space is full of trillions and trillions and trillions of these. Given the rate of detection, we’ll probably see them come through regularly.
- giardini 1y ago"Oh, my God! That's the intergalactic mail van from Xenorph 44! We won't get any more supplies for another century!888----<((( Gaaah! Nothing to eat but Earthlings...." - overheard on Avi Loeb's radio telescope, but fortunately mis-translated.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- modzu 1y agothe thought of this frozen rock drifting through space for billions of years fills me with existential dread :(
- mrexroad 1y agoQuite the opposite for me. I’m fascinated and inspired by the fact that this rock escaped the gravity well of one star and is now visiting another.
- stouset 1y agoWait until you hear what Earth has been up to in that same time.
- komali2 1y ago80 years (if lucky) is an unfathomably cruel prank and a prison.
- bluerooibos 1y agoI'm quite hopeful that anyone under 40 (arbitrary, mostly because I'm in my mid-30s) will get to LEV (longevity escape velocity) - there's a ton of anti-ageing and disease-curing research going on, especially now with the likes of DeepMind and others accelerating said research. That's assuming you manage to avoid death from microplastics, climate change or AI-related societal collapse, etc.
- komali2 1y agoIn your perspective, why would these drugs be made available to the general public given they'd be arguably the most valuable thing every produced in human history? Presumably one or a few companies would own the IP, so they would of course charge massive sums for them because that's what corporations are supposed to do. So how does that not happen?
- jmorenoamor 1y agoAstronomy usually has that kind of "Lovecraftian" sense of cosmic insignificance when you put things to sacale. Also, being alone at 3am in the middle of nowhere, cold and kind of sleepy, looking at a gas cloud lightyears away, adds to it. But it is also fascinating.
- v3ss0n 1y agoAnd NASA shutdown
- freen 1y agoDon’t Look Up!
- rd07 1y agoIt is amazing how in under 100 years, we go from first object in space to controlling several spacecrafts in Mars orbit/surface in order to observe a specific object in the sky.
- wbl 1y agoWhy don't we have an interceptor ready to go for the next one?
- EvgeniyZh 1y agoTrip to Mars (~its closest point) is much longer than time we had. The chances the next one will be close enough to Earth and low enough speed so it can be matched is astronomically low and such interceptor would be quite expensive
- wbl 1y agoA flyby is fine, and I'm willing to explore some 1960's propulsion solutions.
- librasteve 1y ago> it’s traveling through our solar system at roughly 130,000 miles per hour (210,000 kph). That’s the highest velocity ever recorded for a solar system visitor. so that's the fastest (macro & reachable) thing ever - good luck sticking a flag on it
- TrnsltLife 1y agoI like the fact that we have enough probes roaming around the solar system that we can redirect them to travel toward or at least look at an anomaly that seems worthy of study. It's not quite at the level of redirecting the Enterprise to study an anomaly but it's getting there.