(Abraham) Loeb has caught the public’s – and NASA’s – attention for his comments about a newly discovered interstellar object, known as 3I/ATLAS, that is hurtling toward the sun and through our solar system. NASA says it’s a comet. Loeb suggests it could be alien technology.
It’s just a rock. Without any ice. 🤦♂️
(this is that “comet” without a tail, right?)
It has ice and it has a tail. Comets get a longer “tail” as they get closer to the sun, when heat and radiation cause them to disintigrate and off-gas.
ATLAS’s speed and origin are what make it interesting. It’s a speedy guy for a comet at its location/trajectory. And, it’s interstellar in origin, meaning it came from outside the solar system. Most of what we see in our solar neighborhood was all made from the same big space glob a long ass time ago. Interstellar objects are rare… ish. We’ve been seeing more since we have big space telescopes now. So who knows.
Anyway, when ATLAS gets closer to the sun and burns off more tail, we can analyze those bits of rock and gas to figure out what it’s made of and maybe where it’s from.