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Deuterium, a stable and non-radioactive isotope of hydrogen that features a neutron in addition to the single proton in its core, is extremely abundant across the universe.
But when combined with tritium, a different hydrogen isotope that features not just one but two additional neutrons, it can kick start a powerful nuclear fusion reaction. Scientists hope to one day use these isotopes to generate an abundance of clean energy using advanced reactors.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb — who has long posited that mysterious interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, which recently swung through the inner solar system for a brief visit, could be a piece of alien technology — is intrigued by recent findings that the interstellar object is teeming with the hydrogen isotope.
In a recent blog, Loeb pointed to two yet-to-be-peer-reviewed papers that found that 3I/ATLAS bears an unusually high concentration of deuterium.
Don’t get too excited yet. As the papers’ authors admit, the abundance of the intriguing isotope could far more easily be explained by natural processes spanning billions of years, casting doubt on the spicy hypothesis that 3I/ATLAS could be an alien spacecraft using a fusion reactor to propel itself.
The first paper, which was submitted for review at Nature Astronomy last week, saw an international team of researchers, including scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and Jet Propulsion Lab, analyze near-infrared spectroscopy data of the interstellar object recorded by the James Webb Space Telescope last year.
The team found an “unexpectedly high” deuterium to hydrogen ratio in methane molecules shed by the object, an “exceedingly rare detection of deuterated organic molecules in an interstellar object.”
They suggest that the unusual abundance of deuterium could be the “natural consequence of formation” in an extremely cold environment, such as the proto-planetary disk surrounding its potentially ancient home in another solar system.
“Thus, 3I/ATLAS formed in an environment very different from that in which our Sun and planets originated,” the team concluded.
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