5 ms·
Rapid Brightening of 3I/Atlas Ahead of Perihelion
- ceejayoz 1y agoDon't worry, Avi Loeb is on it. https://avi-loeb.medium.com/3i-atlas-rapidly-brightens-and-gets-bluer-than-the-sun-near-perihelion-3bf100df8390 https://avi-loeb.medium.com/3i-atlas-rapidly-brightens-and-g... "Does it employ a power source that is hotter than the Sun?" Sigh.
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y agoI don't like to discourage questions like that, because they kill curiosity. We know what the likely answer is, but reasonable assumptions are just that. Assumptions. Why not let mind wander about the exciting ( if somewhat hard to consider as possible ) lines of thinking.
- dylan604 1y agoThere's a difference in asking questions and pushing as fact with no evidence. It swings both ways
- ares623 1y agoPlus he is an authority figure with a captive audience. He has a much higher responsibility than the average person speculating.
- dylan604 1y agoYeah it doesn't instill a lot of confidence in the quality of ivy league credentials when guys like this are running around spouting nonsense. I'm surprised there's not a clause in his employee handbook that says to not be an obvious troll. Kooky science is one thing but this is just the type of person the men with butterfly nets and white coats should be interested
- gojomo 1y agoHuh? What is Loeb's 'captive audience'?
- ceejayoz 1y agoUFO nuts desperate for anyone with a shred of academic credibility.
- gojomo 1y agoWhat is Loeb pushing as fact with no evidence? Can you provide a representative quote?
- dekhn 1y agoYou can easily answer this with a Google search.
- gojomo 1y agoNo, I can't, because all I've seen from Loeb is pretty clear about what is fact, and what is speculation. I don't know, and there's no way to find via "Google search", what HN user ~dylan604 is specifically alleging has been improperly "pushed as fact". If it's clear to you, can you share a representative quote from Loeb? He's got a lot of writing to choose from!
- ceejayoz 1y ago[flagged]
- dekhn 1y agoHe moved from merely asking questions to promoting an unsupported claim without any real evidence (repeatedly). he's not curious.
- TheBlight 1y agoPlanetary scientist academics are angry because he's getting all of the attention and it isn't even in the field he's most known for previously. Even smart humans are still humans.
- dylan604 1y agoMaybe it's being driven by Bat Boy? I miss the days when tabloid fodder stayed in the tabloids.
- gaoshan 1y agoThat's a pretty wild, and public, hypothetical for someone with his standing at Harvard.
- ceejayoz 1y agoThat's his grift these days. He'll have the same to say about the next one.
- conradev 1y agoWhen we observe a fourth interstellar object, I'll gladly read Avi Loeb's wildest speculations alongside more measured perspectives. This is the third time we're observing an interstellar object?
- ceejayoz 1y agoYes, this is the third to be spotted. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1I/%CA%BBOumuamua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1I/%CA%BBOumuamua 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2I/Borisov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2I/Borisov 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3I/ATLAS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3I/ATLAS 2/3 of them Loeb has made wild claims about.
- gojomo 1y agoWhy would someone "with his standing at Harvard" be expected to avoid "wild, and public, hypothetical[s]"? Does everyone at any prestigious institution have some duty to remain conventionally mundane in all their musings? Is there any reason to think such hypotheticals are, on net, more harmful than helpful? Isn't tenure (like Loeb's) designed to encourage a fearlessness around topics & speech?
- darig 1y ago[dead]
- CamperBob2 1y agoWouldn't be especially interesting if it did. Even a mantis shrimp can do that: https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/og0n3b/the_mantis_shrimp_can_punch_as_fast_as_a_bullet/ https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/og0n3b/t...
- ceejayoz 1y agoIt would be deeply interesting for a comet to have a power source of any kind.
- all2 1y agoA volcanic comet?
- ceejayoz 1y agoA (hot) volcano on a comet would be very interesting, especially if said volcano was hotter than the sun. Even with cryovolcanoes, the power source is not on the comet; it's the sun.
- CamperBob2 1y agoMaybe it's a chunk of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przybylski%27s_Star https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przybylski%27s_Star -- which admittedly is pretty darned strange in itself.
- kulahan 1y agoThis doesn't mean everyone is overhyping the comet, it means you're underhyping the mantis shrimp. There are a number of absolutely unimaginable miracles of nature on Earth.
- walleeee 1y agoFewer every year. If 3I/A is ET flyby, perhaps our progress trading primitive simulacra for biological miracles will satisfy it that we pose no great risk, annihilation being costly and reserved for planets with better long term odds
- m4r1k 1y agoDr. Avi has a pretty clear point and he goes into details on the JRE released just yesterday. https://youtu.be/EaAun27gftk https://youtu.be/EaAun27gftk What most stand out is the sheer amount of closed mind people in the accademia, Avi is not afraid of making suggestions of what it might be and even saying “if it turns out of being a rock, so be it”.
- ceejayoz 1y agoJust to be clear, "here he is shilling it to Joe Rogan" was intended to support his theory? > even saying “if it turns out of being a rock, so be it” I don't doubt it! He'll get another chance the next time we spot another one.
- ctoth 1y agoAnybody else feel like there're just ... too many active plotlines? It is/isn't the Singularity while we are going and not going into WW III, while Rama is maybe zooming by, while Modern Rome does the whole fall of the Republic nonsense, or maybe doesn't! While the H5N1 thing is still churning away reassorting in pigs! Narrative superposition is exhausting.
- kakacik 1y agoTurn off active screen devices and go for a (very long) walk. News are exhausting only if you allow them to be.
- ctoth 1y agoI appreciate what you're trying to say here, but this was more an infovore glorying in how weird everything is than someone who has too much screen time (I don't, in fact, even use a screen.) But also sometimes monitoring the world is useful. I'm very glad I was paying attention in February 2020, for instance!
- pavel_lishin 1y agoDon't forget a bunch of infected rhesus monkeys escaping an overturned truck.
- withinboredom 1y agoffs. Seriously?
- chasd00 1y agoOne of my (highly educated and successful) buddies thinks it some sort of alien interstellar probe. I told my 13 year, who keeps up with these kinds of things, and asked what he thinks. He just kind of stared at me and then said "i think it's a comet from outside the solar system." and went back to playing DCS. heh from the mouth of babes..
- baggy_trough 1y agoClearly your son has not studied its orbital path near 2 major planets.
- ceejayoz 1y agoWhat in said path would you like to highlight? https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ESA%E2%80%99s_Mars_and_Jupiter_missions_observe_comet_3I-ATLAS_ESA512908.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ESA%E2%80%99s_Mars_a... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3I/ATLAS#Trajectory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3I/ATLAS#Trajectory
- baggy_trough 1y agoIt goes very close to 2 major planets. What's the chance of that?
- ceejayoz 1y agoIt was only detected when 4.5 AUs from the Sun (which, I'll also note, exerts significant graviational force on inbound objects). It was already close; we can't currently detect the tens/hundreds/thousands of similar objects likely whizzing past at further distances as we speak. If it was 100 AUs at closest approach, we would never have seen it. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud is still theoretical, even) The chances of yesterday's Powerball numbers being 04 24 49 60 65 01 was about 1:300M.
- 1y ago
- ahmedfromtunis 1y agoHow cool is it that, as a species, we developed tools to allow us to continue watching an interstellar object zapping the void on the other side of the sun!!! Seeing how everything is going, though, I strongly feel like we peaked as a species and that, while we'll continue up for a (short) while, the downgrade is just inevitable.
- tcdent 1y agoTo be clear, we're not looking through the Sun at the object. We're looking past the Sun at the object through a telescope that is positioned to observe the Sun, for the most recent imagery. I agree with you, but I have been experimenting with image processing using the data available from this satellite (as a hobbyist). Honestly, while it's impressive that we gather data from a piece of technology that's floating in space, the resolution of this is nothing to write home about. If I take anything away from my brief amount of experience with this, it's that we still have a long way to go in terms of the quality of our imaging of our surrounding space. I haven't fully finished my processing yet and still need to tune the wavelength and account for some drift, but this is basically the state-of-the-art: https://tcdent-pub.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/3i_atlas_10302025_1.mp4 https://tcdent-pub.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/3i_atlas_10302...
- zarmin 1y agoslightly off-topic thought experiment that's been on my mind lately: to us, the sun appears to be the size of, let's say, a quarter held at arm's length. this is at 93M miles (1AU, or ~8 light minutes) distance. if we moved the sun 100 miles away from earth, it would take up the entire sky. now in the other direction, if we doubled the distance, to 2AU, it would appear to us as half its normal size and 1/4 as bright (irradiance follows inverse square law). at 3AU the sun would be 1/9 as bright and 3x smaller than a quarter. at 100AU, we're talking about brightness of 1/100^2 (one ten-thousandth) the sun's apparent brightness. with me so far? Sirius A: the brightest star we can see; 25x more luminous than the sun; 2x the size of the sun; 8.6 light YEARS distance (544,000AU) from earth. if we moved the sun to the same distance as Sirius A, it would appear 296 BILLION times dimmer and 544,000 times smaller. yet Sirius A is easily visible - the brightest star in our sky - despite being only 25x more luminous and 2x larger. do you see the discrepancy? 25x more luminous doesn't compensate for a 296-billion-fold brightness loss. The numbers we are given don't make sense, not even close. (and this is without considering diffusion, which would make the discrepancy even worse.) i'm not proposing an explanation or a modification to the model, i just think the data don't make sense.
- GolfPopper 1y ago>The numbers we are given don't make sense These are all numbers you just provided, with no source for them. But even using your numbers, 300 billion is 3x10^11. The Sun provides about 10^5 lux, while starlight overall provides about 10^-4 lux[1], which is a difference of 10^9, meaning the difference between "all the starlight on a dark night" and "just the starlight from Sirius" would be around 10^2, which... seems about right? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28illuminance%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28illumin...
- ceejayoz 1y agoYeah, people get really messed up by just how good our eyes are. (For a close-to-home example, people think indoor plants get a lot closer to sunlight-level amounts than they really do.) We can spot a single photon in the right conditions. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12172 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12172
- bashtoni 1y agoFor those unaware, there are a ton of AI generated videos across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook of physicist Brian Cox saying this is an alien spacecraft: https://www.ign.com/articles/physicist-brian-cox-thanks-youtube-for-taking-down-ai-shite-accounts-featuring-deepfakes-of-him-saying-nonsense-about-comet-atlas-3i-being-a-spaceship https://www.ign.com/articles/physicist-brian-cox-thanks-yout...
- moffkalast 1y agoDamn interstellar tourists, just coming here, taking in the sights and leaving. The least they could do is spend some money in the local economy, smh.