A new paper on spectroscopic data from the Very Large Telescope (accessible here) reported the surprising detection of nickel without iron in the plume of gas around 3I/ATLAS. Nickel without iron is a signature of industrial production of nickel alloys. This data constitutes a new anomaly of 3I/ATLAS. Natural comets generically show iron and nickel simultaneously, as both elements are produced together in the ejecta of supernova explosions.
Is this anomaly another clue for a possible technological origin of 3I/ATLAS? The paper suggests chemical formation through the nickel carbonyl channel which is an extremely rare and exotic possibility in comets, whereas it is a standard technology for industrial nickel refining.
The inferred mass loss rate of nickel for 3I/ATLAS is about 5 grams per second at a heliocentric distance of 2.8 times the Earth-Sun separation (AU). It exhibits a dramatic rise with decreasing distance from the sun, with a power-law index of -8.43 (+/-0.79).
The spectroscopic data on the plume surrounding 3I/ATLAS also reveals cyanide (CN), with a mass loss rate of about 20 grams per second at 2.85 AU and an even steeper dependence on heliocentric distance to the power of -9.38 (+/-1.2).
These results add to the chemical anomalies implied by the SPHEREx space observatory (here) and Webb space telescope (here), which revealed that the gas plume around 3I/ATLAS is dominated by mass with 95% of CO2 and only 5% of H2O, very different from an expected water-rich comet. The idea that the nucleus is much smaller than the 46-kilometer diameter inferred from the 1-micron data collected by SPHEREx, requires a dense coma of dust to reflect nearly all the sunlight from 3I/ATLAS. In that case, the dust would have been pushed by solar radiation pressure to trail the nucleus, constituting a prominent cometary tail. However, no cometary tail was observed around 3I/ATLAS in the Hubble Space Telescope image (available here), which extended backward as much as it extended sideways, perpendicular to the direction of the Sun.
If, on the other hand, most of the sunlight is reflected by the surface of the nucleus, then 3I/ATLAS is a million times more massive than the previous interstellar object 2I/Borisov. We should have detected a million objects of the scale of 2I/Borisov before detecting a 46-kilometer nucleus if 3I/ATLAS was a rock on a random trajectory. The fine-tuned alignment of the trajectory of 3I/ATLAS with the ecliptic plane of the planets (discussed here) suggests that it may have targeted the inner solar system by technological design, as I suggested in a paper written a few days after 3I/ATLAS was discovered (accessible here).
I am writing this report from Copenhagen, where I was invited to give a lecture at a conference titled “Current Themes in Astrophysics and Particle Physics 2025,” and attended by Nobel laureate David Gross and other leading physicists and astrophysicists.
Copenhagen is well known to physicists as the birthplace of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. When I entered Auditorium A at the Niels Bohr Institute, the room looked familiar. I remembered a photograph of this auditorium from 1930, which showed at the front row: Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli and Lev Landau who pioneered quantum mechanics. Niels Bohr debated Albert Einstein about the proper interpretation of quantum mechanics and his view on indeterminism, the irreversibility of quantum measurements, and complementarity — that objects have certain pairs of complementary properties which cannot all be observed or measured simultaneously, prevailed to form the modern understanding of physics.
As soon as I chose a seat at the center of the wooden bench, I was informed that I just sat where Wolfgang Pauli sat 95 years ago. But all that I could think about at that moment is how uncomfortable the seating bench is and how much worse the quality of life must have been for these luminaries a century ago. Nevertheless, I would have happily traded being in the same room 95 years ago, when the excitement of discovery was routine and deviations from traditional thinking was celebrated rather than being ridiculed on social media.
My lecture (accessible here) was split into two parts: black holes and interstellar objects. The second part was added at the last minute based on a request from members of the audience during the coffee break.
In the spirit of the 1930 photograph marking pathbreaking discussions, I enjoyed the lively exchange on 3I/ATLAS. In the Q&A segment that followed my lecture, excited members of the audience that filled the room with some standing in the back, asked numerous questions about 3I/ATLAS. David Gross was interested about messaging 3I/ATLAS, why it sheds CO2 if it is technological, and whether there is any evidence for a non-gravitational acceleration. The conference organizers, Emil Bohr and Johan Samsing noted: “What a wonderful and refreshing talk.” For a rare moment in my 45-year career in physics, I had felt a sense of genuine curiosity and the spirit of an authentic discussion of all possibilities. This was the spirit that brought me to physics in the first place. Auditorium A delivered what I expected from it. The stiff wooden bench on which we all sat did its job. It is a metaphor for the stubborn facts that revolutionized our perception of the physical world when quantum mechanics was discovered, and that would revolutionize our mental world when we encounter alien technology.
On October 3, 2025, 3I/ATLAS will pass within 29 million kilometers from and the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which will be able to image it with a 30 kilometer per pixel resolution. Such an image could separate the contributions of the nucleus and coma to the reflected sunlight and constrain with greater confidence the size of the nucleus.
David Gross suggested that we should also observe 3I/ATLAS with radio telescopes for any technological radio transmission coming from it. I agree. This encounter is a blind date of interstellar proportions, and on any blind date my best advice is: “Observe the other side.” We had already revealed our existence by broadcasting radio signals for over a century. This act might have triggered the visit. If 3I/ATLAS had originated from the inner edge of the Oort Cloud at about 1,000 times the Earth-Sun separation, it would have started its journey 80 years ago when radio transmissions became routine on Earth. The first nuclear explosion took place on July 16, 1945, exactly 80 years ago.
On the one hand I would be pleased if 3I/ATLAS turned out to be a CO2-rich comet, implying that humanity is not at risk from alien technology, but on the other hand — humanity desperately needs a wake-up call to avoid self-destruction.
During the coffee break, the brilliant Alex Lupsasca told me about his recent mathematical discovery of three new symmetries in black hole spacetimes (discussed here). After laboring to discover them, Alex asked ChatGPT to find these symmetries and was shocked to find out that the latest version of this Artificial Intelligence (AI) system managed to accomplish the same task swiftly. He later verified with OpenAI that the AI system did not have access to his paper as it was trained on older data. Perhaps super-human intelligence is already among us.
Of course, alien AI might supersede our own digital creations. If any future interstellar object will end up as technological technology, ranking 10 on the Loeb Scale, we should be filled with gratitude for the Universe endowing us, once again, with a much-needed sense of cosmic modesty.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
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