Uploaded December 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
When it reemerged from behind the Sun, 3I/ATLAS should have been in pieces.
Instead, the interstellar visitor came back glowing with an eerie, forward-facing plume shining ahead of it, as if the object had switched on a headlight to scan the darkness. Comets don’t do that. Comets trail light. They don’t cast beams forward like searchlights sweeping for danger.
But 3I/ATLAS has a habit of doing things comets aren’t supposed to do.
It is only the third interstellar object ever found—yet it dwarfs the others. Current calculations suggest it may be a 14-mile-wide mass weighing more than 33 billion tons. That’s Manhattan-sized, a million times heavier than ’Oumuamua. We should have seen hundreds of thousands of smaller interstellar objects before ever finding something this big. We didn’t.
Then came the jets. One sunward jet stretches roughly 620,000 miles—longer than the distance from Earth to the Moon. The opposite jet extends nearly two million miles. To eject that much mass, something inside it would have needed to absorb an impossible amount of solar energy. Unless, as Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb puts it, the jets aren’t natural at all—but “thrusters on a technological spacecraft.”
And thrusters would explain a lot...
When it reemerged from behind the Sun, 3I/ATLAS should have been in pieces.
Instead, the interstellar visitor came back glowing with an eerie, forward-facing plume shining ahead of it, as if the object had switched on a headlight to scan the darkness. Comets don’t do that. Comets trail light. They don’t cast beams forward like searchlights sweeping for danger.
But 3I/ATLAS has a habit of doing things comets aren’t supposed to do.
It is only the third interstellar object ever found—yet it dwarfs the others. Current calculations suggest it may be a 14-mile-wide mass weighing more than 33 billion tons. That’s Manhattan-sized, a million times heavier than ’Oumuamua. We should have seen hundreds of thousands of smaller interstellar objects before ever finding something this big. We didn’t.
Then came the jets. One sunward jet stretches roughly 620,000 miles—longer than the distance from Earth to the Moon. The opposite jet extends nearly two million miles. To eject that much mass, something inside it would have needed to absorb an impossible amount of solar energy. Unless, as Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb puts it, the jets aren’t natural at all—but “thrusters on a technological spacecraft.”
And thrusters would explain a lot...
