Earlier this month, astronomers were thrilled to spot an interstellar object — only the third of its kind ever observed — hurtling toward the center of the solar system on an extremely unusual trajectory and at a breakneck velocity.
While we're only beginning to understand the unusual object, dubbed 3I/ATLAS, the discovery led to widespread speculation, with some scientists suggesting that it may be almost as old as the Milky Way galaxy itself, and billions of years older than our own Sun.
Unsurprisingly, Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb — who has extensively written about 'Oumuamua, the second interstellar object ever discovered, notably hypothesizing that it might have been a relic from an extraterrestrial civilization — has now waded into the discussion.
In a blog post on Medium, he argued that it will take more observations to conclude the nature of 3I/ATLAS, which is likely either a comet or asteroid. However, Loeb didn't rule out the "tantalizing possibility" that it was "sent towards the inner solar system by design" — a conclusion that's already proved controversial.
Loeb chided the editors of Wikipedia and the scientific journal RNAAS for striking the hypothesis from his contributions, showing once again that his theories about extraterrestrial probes visiting our solar system remain as contentious as ever.
The astronomer has remained steadfast in his belief that 'Oumuamua, an interstellar object first observed in 2017, may have been sent to us by an alien civilization, garnering him enormous attention in the media. He has even gone on to hunt for pieces of what he claims may be an alien spacecraft, based on detections of a three-foot, interstellar meteor crash-landing near Papua New Guinea in early 2014, by combing the ocean floor with a modified ship.
In other words, his latest comments about 3I/ATLAS are very much in line with what we'd expect from him.
In his blog post, Loeb announced that he had authored a new paper about 3I/ATLAS' unusual size. Based on its "anomalously bright" nature, the astronomer concluded that the object was roughly 12.4 miles in diameter.
That would make it considerably larger than 'Oumuamua, which only measured anywhere from 330 to 1,300 feet long.
However, those calculations raise more questions than answers.
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