The mysterious interstellar object has sparked speculation it could be an alien spacecraft after surviving a fiery solar flyby, emitting bizarre radio signals and not disintegrating as expected
A mystery object feared to be an alien ship heading to Earth did not break up as it passed the Sun like a comet would, a boffin said. New images of the “interstellar anomaly” known as 3I/ATLAS show a single body two weeks after its perihelion passage.
Theoretical physicist Avi Loeb – who has led warnings the huge space rock could be an “extraterrestrial artefact” about to make first contact – said the fact it remains a single body is “surprising for a natural comet”.
It comes after the UFO was seen hurtling across our solar system with a “complex tail” as pictures revealed a powerful jet stream behind it, which Loeb suggested could be “technological thrusters.”
Loeb wrote in his blog: “This raises a new anomaly of 3I/ATLAS that must be explained by those who wish to shove the anomalies of 3I/ATLAS under the carpet of traditional knowledge on solar system comets rather than consider alternatives.
“As Albert Einstein said: “Knowledge is realizing that the street is one way; wisdom is looking in both directions anyway.”
Most boffins think it’s a comet that has been travelling for billions of years and the “anti-tail” visible in recent photos is ice melting from the speeding space rock.
But Loeb – head of Harvard’s Galileo Project –said given the object’s modest size, about 3.5 miles wide, there is not enough ice to explain such dramatic outbursts.
He added: “Given the large-scale jets reported recently, the fact that 3I/ATLAS remains a single body is surprising for a natural comet.
“In particular, the large-scale image of 3I/ATLAS reported on November 9 shows jets reaching out to ~1 million kilometres towards the Sun and ~3 million kilometres in the opposite direction, as discussed here.
“For a natural comet, the outflow velocity of the jets is expected to be 0.4 kilometers per second, of order the sound speed of gas at the distance of 3I/ATLAS from the Sun. At that speed, the jets must have persisted over a timescale of 1–3 months.”
He added: “On natural cometary nuclei, the pockets of ice often cover a small fraction of the total surface, making the above numbers untenable for 3I/ATLAS as a single body that maintained its integrity and did not break up into numerous fragments.”
Discovered on July 1, 2025, Comet 3I/ATLAS is the third known object from outside our solar system to be discovered hurtling through space.
Many scientists think it is potentially the oldest of its kind ever seen and it was catapulted out of an alien star system in the “frontier” region of the Milky Way up to seven billion years ago.
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