New Questions and Answers About 3I/ATLAS
In recent days, I was asked by multiple fans about the apparent media blackout surrounding the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS after its Mars flyby on October 3, 2025.
We expect imaging and spectroscopic data from the High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) camera onboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO); the Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph (IUVS) onboard NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft; the High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) as well as the OMEGA and SPectroscopy for the Investigation of the Characteristics of the Atmosphere of Mars (SPICAM) spectrometers onboard ESA’s Mars Express; the Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System (CaSSis), the Infrared Spectrometer for ExoMars (ISEM) and the NOMAD spectrometer onboard ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO); the Moderate Resolution Imaging Camera (MoRIC) onboard China’s Tianwen-1 as well as the Emirates eXploration Imager (EXI) and Emirates Mars Infrared and Ultraviolet Spectrometers (EMIRS and EMUS) onboard the Hope Orbiter of UAE’s Emirates Mars Mission.
In reply, I explained that NASA is affected by the U.S. government shutdown and large research teams often take days to weeks before they release scientific reports. Long delays are not a signature of extraterrestrial alien intelligence but rather of terrestrial human stupidity.
Another question that came up during this hiatus in Martian reports, involved the expected approach angle of interstellar objects into the ecliptic plane of the Earth around the Sun. In a recent essay (accessible here), I argued that the alignment of the path of 3I/ATLAS with the ecliptic plane to within 4.89 degrees is extremely rare with a random chance of a fraction of a percent. Some fans asked whether objects arriving from the Milky-Way disk would be more likely to enter at small inclination angles relative to the ecliptic plane.
In response, I explained that the ecliptic plane is misaligned relative to the plane of the Milky-Way disk by about 60 degrees. This misalignment angle is ten times larger than the inclination angle of 3I/ATLAS. The orientation of these planes can be defined by the angular-momentum vector of the objects tracing it. The alignment probability of two vectors scales as the solid angle spanned by their angular separation (which scales as the square of the angle for small angles), suggesting a random chance of less than a percent for 3I/ATLAS.
In addition, stars in the galactic disk have a random speed that is about 10% of their rotation speed around the center of the Milky-Way. Owing to the restoring gravitational force from the disk, they go up and down in a so-called epicyclic motion. Locally, the velocity dispersion of stars is comparable to within a factor of 2 in all directions. This is expected to be the case for any population of tracers which originate from planetary systems, such as interstellar objects. As a result, interstellar objects are expected to arrive into the Solar system from all directions (as discussed in recent scientific papers here, here, and here). Indeed, 1I/`Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov arrived into the solar system with inclinations of 123 and 44 degrees relative to the ecliptic plane, respectively, making the inclination angle of 3I/ATLAS anomalously small.
Finally, following the release of new video interviews (posted here and here), I received the following message:
“Professor and scientist Avi Loeb,
I am a multidisciplinary artist and I wanted to tell you that I find your ideas about space really fascinating and have been watching your interviews about the recent interstellar object.
I normally don’t write to scientists and I am going to keep this short because I know you are a busy person.
I decided to write to you because I think the research you are doing is important and I wanted to tell you thanks for doing that.
The interviews you gave inspired my art. If you want me to send an image when it’s complete I can. I don’t know if you like art or not.”
Of course, I love art because I value it as a legitimate interpretation of reality, sometimes as insightful as the scientific counterpart. Scientists have the illusion that their interpretation of nature has a universal value, shared by all forms of intelligence in the Universe. One of the biggest revelations that I anticipate from an encounter with a higher level of alien intelligence, is the realization that alien science is different from ours. The size of the human brain was capped at consuming 20% of the metabolic power load of the human body. If alien beings have larger brains or they are assisted by better artificial intelligence systems than we possess, then they may have understood reality much better than our best scientists. Their version of Albert Einstein might have figured out how to create baby universes in the laboratory or how to harness quantum vacuum fluctuations in propelling spacecraft or how to live forever. With that level of intelligence, our terrestrial constructions would appear like an ant hill because their utilities are limited in scope to Earth, the rocky planet that we were born on. Artistic imagination holds the potential to remove the blinkers that block our sideway vision and expand the horizons of the knowledge we seek in the cosmos, where most of the real estate resides.
The possibility of interstellar objects like 3I/ATLAS carrying alien technologies and representing unimaginable alien worlds gives a whole new meaning to the lyrics of Judy Garland’s song in the film “Wizard of Oz”,
“Somewhere over the rainbow
Way up high
There’s a land that I heard of
Once in a lullaby
Somewhere over the rainbow
Skies are blue
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true
Someday I’ll wish upon a star
And wake up where the clouds are far behind me
Where troubles melt like lemon drops
Away above the chimney tops
That’s where you’ll find me”
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.
