As evidence continues to mount that the mysterious object with interstellar origins currently speeding toward the inner solar system at a breakneck speed is a comet, not everybody's convinced quite yet.
Harvard astronomer and alien hunter Avi Loeb raised the far-fetched, yet tantalizing possibility that the object, which was first spotted by astronomers earlier this year, could have been sent by an extraterrestrial civilization.
While he admitted in a blog post last month that it's most likely that "3I/ATLAS is a completely natural interstellar object, probably a comet," a letter to the editors of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics has Loeb questioning that conclusion once more.
At the heart of the conundrum is the purported comet's tail. The glowing globs of icy particulates conventionally leave a trail of gas and dust in a comet's wake, resulting in their distinctive shape.
However, there's a slim chance that 3I/ATLAS may be an outlier. According to the paper, which was authored by an international team of astronomers, 3I/ATLAS "exhibits increasing dust activity and reddening colors during the observation period, with no visible tail detected."
The lack of a tail could be "likely due to viewing geometry and low dust production," they posited.
The researchers, therefore, called on the astronomy community to continue monitoring the unusual object to glean more "insights into the evolution of interstellar materials under solar radiation."
Loeb agreed with the sentiment, arguing in a recent blog post that the "more data we collect, the more difficult it would be for scientists to shove anomalies of 3I/ATLAS under the carpet of traditional thinking."
"We are used to finding icy rocks which exhibit familiar cometary tails in the solar system," he added, "but an encounter with objects from interstellar space is a blind date on astronomical scales."
To Loeb, it's still too early to definitively conclude that 3I/ATLAS is a comet. To the astronomer, who previously authored a book about the possibility that 'Oumuamua, an interstellar object first observed in 2017, may have been an sent to us by an alien civilization, there's still enough compelling evidence suggesting otherwise.
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