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The mysterious flying object making its way through our solar system has yet again baffled scientists – with 3I/ATLAS carrying a ‘puzzling’ secret that shouldn’t be there
Scientist and Harvard professor Avi Loeb has found something “extremely puzzling” on the “spaceship” 3I/ATLAS that he believes shouldn’t be there.
A mysterious flying object entered our solar system many months ago, leaving several experts baffled. It has been closely tracked, with some theories suggesting it could even be an intelligence system from another far-away galaxy. While NASA sources say the object is merely a comet, Loeb has shared several theories on why this could not be the case.
His latest theory, as detailed in his personal blog, suggests the comet has a strange feature which could not translate to a simple comet. He wrote: “At the distances at which comets are observed, the temperature is far too low to vaporise silicate, sulfide, and metallic grains that contain nickel and iron atoms.
“Therefore, the presence of nickel and iron atoms in cometary coma is extremely puzzling… 3I/ATLAS, which is a C2-depleted comet, exhibits extreme properties in the early phases of its activity with regard to the production rates and abundance ratios of nickel and iron”.
But Loeb’s theories have been contradictory. Just days ago, he told NewsNation: “At this point, given all the data that we have, I would agree that it’s most likely natural, but there are still a lot of things we don’t understand about it.”
In a recent update to his popular Medium blog, the astrophysicist has now discussed “radio signals” which seem to have emitted from 3I/ATLAS. In a comedown from his previous claims, he says that “the vast majority” of radio hits “did not coincide with 3I/ATLAS in the sky”.
Avi Loeb wrote: “A new paper reports data from 7.25 hours during July 2, 2025 of radio observations of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS with the Allen Telescope Array. Within the frequency range of 1–9 GHz, there were nearly 74 million narrowband hits.
“After mitigating Radio Frequency Interference in the dataset, only about 2 million hits were left. These hits were further filtered by sky localisation.
“The vast majority of them did not coincide with 3I/ATLAS in the sky. The remaining 211 hits were visually inspected in the time-frequency domain and the observers did not find any signals worthy of additional follow-up.
The next big milestone for 3I/ATLAS is in March 2026, when it is expected to pass near Jupiter.
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