An interstellar object coming close to Earth could be alien technology first detected by scientists decades ago, Harvard University physicist Avi Loeb told Newsmax on Thursday.
The object, called 3I/ATLAS, was detected moving through the solar system on July 1 and is expected to pass Mars on Friday at an extremely high velocity.
In a Medium blog post last week, Loeb, the Frank B. Baird Jr. professor of science at Harvard, noted that the comet is "unusually massive ... with an unusual chemical composition on an unusually rare trajectory," and posited that it could be "alien technology" that emitted the famous "Wow! Signal" in 1977.
He told Newsmax's "Wake Up America" that "there are some anomalies about this object, so we should keep our eyes open" to possibilities about its origins, including a small chance that it could be alien technology.
Loeb said the object is "at least five kilometers in diameter, but it could be up to a factor of 10 bigger than that. And the puzzle here is that it's at least a thousand times more massive than the previous object, Borisov, which was a comet."
He added, "But then you ask yourself: How come the previous object was roughly a couple of times the size of a football field, and this one is of ... Manhattan Island? There is also not enough rocky material in interstellar space to accommodate the delivery of a size roughly the size of a Manhattan Island once per decade."
Loeb continued, "Now, in addition to that, its trajectory is aligned with the planet’s to within five degrees, and the chance of that happening at random is 1 in 500. So here is another anomaly. In addition, there was scattered light in front of the object 10 times longer than it is wide in the Hubble Space Telescope image. Usually, we see scattered light behind the object away from the sun, because dust particles are pushed away by radiation pressure from the sun."
According to Loeb, these factors and other details "suggest that we should keep our eyes on the ball" and study the object while it is within range.
"It's coming very close to Mars, which is another anomaly at the end of this week, and we will have a chance to image it with a 30-kilometer resolution per pixel."
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Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.