We assume that knowledge brings respect, but also good judgment. And both characteristics do not always go hand in hand. For this, The best judge is time, responsible for confirming whether the postulates are true. And that’s what Avi Loeb is after.
Doctor in physics, he has been director of the Harvard Astronomy Department for almost 15 years, he is founder of the Harvard Black Hole Initiative (the first interdisciplinary center in the world dedicated to the study of black holes) and since 2007 he has also been director of the Institute for Theory and Computation (ITC) of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. No, he is not a beginner. And yes, it is also one of the few experts who maintains that 3I/ATLAS, the interstellar visitor that is passing through the solar system in these months, is much more than a comet.
For Loeb there is the possibility that it is a Trojan Horse, a technological object masquerading as a natural comet. And for this he gives 7 different reasons, while ensuring that “dogmatists who insist that 3I/ATLAS is a comet of natural origin must be held accountable and explain all of them as the result of probable natural processes”.
For Loeb the First indicator of an “intergalactic Trojan horse” is its mass. The diameter of 3I/ATLAS is greater than 5 kilometers, which means that its minimum mass is 33 billion tons: up to a million times larger than the other two interstellar objects that have visited us: Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov.
The second anomaly would be the wake. According to a Hubble image from 3I/ATLAS, a front jet of scattered sunlight, 10 times longer than wide, can be seen pointing toward the Sun. A weak trail that appeared only at the end of August and is a rare phenomenon, according to Loeb.
Then we have the unusual chemical composition. The gas column around 3I/ATLAS showed much more nickel than iron, as in industrial nickel alloys. To this we must add that, Unlike solar system comets analyzed to date, the plume contained mainly carbon dioxide and not water.
We also have that the light from 3I/ATLAS showed extreme negative polarization. Said like that, it complicates more than it explains. The polarization of light refers to the orientation of its waves. When light is reflected or scattered from an object, it can become polarized, that is, its waves align in a particular direction. In comets and asteroids, polarization has always been observed in the same way, however, in 3I/ATLAS it is “reflected” in a way that has never been seen until now.
Some of these anomalies may be confirmed in the future, others will remain a mystery, due to the impossibility of getting close enough to confirm or rule them out.
For Loeb, one of them is the trajectory of 3I/ATLAS, a “path” that is aligned with the ecliptic plane of the planets around the Sun to within 5 degrees. This is not only strange. According to a study by the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, it’s a one-in-a-million coincidence.
The arrival time of 3I/ATLAS is also presented as an anomaly: this was optimized to pass close to Mars, Venus and Jupiter, something that makes the alignment even less likely. In a nutshell: Its trip would be “scheduled” to coincide on the same plane with the aforementioned planets.
And finally, we have that 3I/ATLAS is aligned to within 9 degrees with the WOW signal, long thought to have come from another civilization. Basically, This means that both the signal and the object come from almost the same direction.. Which is very unlikely: one in thousands, according to a study.
In summary, There are many things that still cannot be explained. But that doesn’t mean it’s an alien object, it’s just that, for now, we don’t know the answers.