NASA has released the latest images of interstellar object 3I/ATLAS which had been eagerly anticipated but put on hold due to the US government shutdown.
3I/ATLAS is not from our own solar system, meaning it has come from a very long way away indeed, and some scientists have argued there might be more to it than meets the eye.
Most reckoned it was a comet, though Harvard scientist Avi Loeb suggested that the interstellar object could be a ‘potentially hostile alien object’ and told LADbible it had been doing some things which were peculiar if it really was a comet.
However, despite him saying that 3I/ATLAS displayed ‘qualities that we’ve never seen for comets’, most scientists reckon it is indeed what NASA has said it was.
NASA previously released a statement saying they were pretty sure what it was saying: “It looks like a comet. It does comet things. It very, very strongly resembles, in just about every way, the comets that we know.
NASA’s Perseverance rover took a picture of 3I/ATLAS as it went by, though you can barely see it (NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS)
“It has some interesting properties that are a little bit different from our solar system comets, but it behaves like a comet. And so the evidence is overwhelmingly pointing to this object being a natural body. It’s a comet.”
Today (19 November) they released more images of 3I/ATLAS which were taken as it passed Mars, which people had been waiting for and reiterated their position that the interstellar object was ‘a comet’.
They said: “First observed earlier this year, the 3I/ATLAS comet is only the third object ever identified as entering our solar system from elsewhere in the galaxy.
“While it poses no threat to Earth and will get no closer than 170 million miles to Earth, the comet flew within 19 million miles of Mars in early October.”
So that means it’s a comet, not aliens.
These are the closest images we’re going to get of the interstellar object, as Mars is the planet it got nearest to on its journey, and even when it gets closest to Earth on 19 December it will be much further away from us.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took this picture of 3I/ATLAS while it was around 19 million miles away (NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona)
Adam Crowl, former director of Icarus Interstellar, an organisation which aims to achieve interstellar travel by 2100, told LADbible that when it comes to taking pictures of objects in space this is about the best we can do.
Even with increasingly powerful telescopes and cameras, we’re dealing with things which are so far away that they are little more than a pinprick on an image.
He said: “We can only pinpoint where the main mass of the comet is within a certain area.
“All the pixel sizes in every image we take of it are actually much larger than the nucleus of the comet itself, so we have this huge vague area where it might be within each image.”
Still, these are the clearest images of 3I/ATLAS we’ve had and NASA is still very clear that as far as they’re concerned, it’s a comet.
