First interstellar comet in our solar system?

Pashalis said:
As you can see (starting here) it could very well be that the comet cluster (or parts of it) have already entered the solar system a while ago (around the year 2000) and have left their first imprints in the system (including earthh, itself). In fact, I think the cluster has already been detected throughout the solar system but just not officially recognized or called as such. I think it is likely that the whole solar system is already experiencing the effects of the first waves of the cluster, including earth.
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Yeah, I agree. It could very well be that this comet is in fact part of the cluster.
 
Some good papers about Oumuamua published last week:


Plain Language Summary​


1I/‘Oumuamua is very strange and it is hard to explain where it came from. We looked at several different ices and the push they would give ‘Oumuamua as they evaporated. We found that the best ice is nitrogen (N2), which would explain many of the things we know about it. ‘Oumuamua was small, about half as long as a city block and only as thick as a three story building, but it was very shiny. The shininess is about the same as the surfaces of Pluto and Triton, which are also covered in nitrogen ice. We suggest ‘Oumuamua was probably thrown out of a young star system about half a billion years ago. Bodies like ‘Oumuamua may allow us to see what the surfaces of a so far unknown type of exoplanet, “exo‐Plutos”, are made of. In a following paper (Desch & Jackson, 2021) we show that orbital instabilities in which giant planets move around, as happened in our own outer solar system 4 billion years ago, could make and throw out large numbers of small pieces of nitrogen ice like ‘Oumuamua. ‘Oumuamua may be the first piece of an exoplanet brought to us.
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and https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020JE006807

Plain Language Summary​


Our Kuiper belt originally had much more mass than today, but an instability caused by Neptune’s migration disrupted their orbits, ejecting most of this material from the Solar System, and simultaneously causing numerous collisions among these bodies. There were thousands of bodies like Pluto, with N2 ice (like the gas in Earth’s atmosphere, but frozen) on their surfaces, and this instability would have generated trillions of N2 ice fragments. A similar fragment, generated in another solar system, after travelling for about a half billion years through interstellar space, would match the size, shape, brightness, and dynamics of the interstellar object 1I/‘Oumuamua. The odds of detecting such an object, as well as more comet‐like objects like the interstellar object 2I/Borisov, are consistent with the numbers of such objects we expect in interstellar space if most stellar systems ejected comets and N2 ice fragments with the same efficiency our solar system did. This implies other stellar systems also had Kuiper belts and similar instabilities. There are hints that some N2 ice fragments may have survived in the Oort cloud of comets in our Solar System. ‘Oumuamua may be the first sample of an exoplanet born around another star, brought to Earth.
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The first paper goes a bit into why the nitrogen ice led to the 'pancake' shape basically by rounding the sun and losing a lot of mass. Though a lot of it is a bit beyond me :-)

A picture from the second paper is attached to this message. It shows what is the theorized journey of it. And it entered the solar system in 1995 already!

Also, a video explanation of those papers from a nice person on youtube starts here:

In the video thumbnail is pretty much the shape and color it is theorized this body has. A bit like the surface of Pluto, nitrogen and tholins, but just 50m across. Pretty cool if you ask me!
 

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Another interstellar object now classified as a comet (C/2025 N1 (ATLAS)) entering the solar system. Will pass between the orbits of Earth and Mars with a close approach to Mars in October 2025. The Watchers website also has more info.

www.sott.net

New interstellar object - Update - It's a comet

A new object is entering the Solar System from interstellar space. Provisionally named A11pl3Z, it is about 20 kilometers wide and currently travelling at a blistering 66 km/s. Early measurements of its orbit suggest an eccentricity of 6 which,...
www.sott.net www.sott.net
 
Vulcan59 said:
Another interstellar object now classified as a comet (C/2025 N1 (ATLAS)) entering the solar system. Will pass between the orbits of Earth and Mars with a close approach to Mars in October 2025. The Watchers website also has more info.

www.sott.net

New interstellar object - Update - It's a comet

A new object is entering the Solar System from interstellar space. Provisionally named A11pl3Z, it is about 20 kilometers wide and currently travelling at a blistering 66 km/s. Early measurements of its orbit suggest an eccentricity of 6 which,...
www.sott.net www.sott.net
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Analysis of 3I/ATLAS from Avi Loeb, head of the Galileo Project

Is the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Alien Technology?​

Today I co-authored an intriguing new paper with the brilliant collaborators Adam Hibberd and Adam Crowl from the Initiative for Interstellar Studies in London, UK. The paper is accessible here.

One of the solutions to Enrico Fermi’s question about extraterrestrials: “where is everybody?” is offered by the dark forest hypothesis, popularized by Cixin Liu’s science fiction novel “The Dark Forest.” This hypothesis proposes that our cosmic neighborhood is dangerous, filled with intelligent civilizations that are hostile and silent to avoid detection by potential predators. In this context, the silence in searches for radio signals by the SETI community is not caused by the lack of extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations, but is instead a consequence of them fearing mutual destruction.

Our paper explores the possibility that the recently discovered interstellar object, 3I/ATLAS, may provide evidence in support of the dark forest hypothesis. This new interstellar interloper has displayed a number of anomalous characteristics, some of which were summarized in an essay that I wrote shortly after its discovery.

...

The near alignment of the retrograde trajectory of 3I/ATLAS with the ecliptic plane offers various benefits to an extraterrestrial intelligence, since it allows a spacecraft to access Earth with relative impunity. The eclipse of 3I/ATLAS by the Sun at perihelion for observers at Earth, would allow a spacecraft to conduct a clandestine reverse Solar Oberth maneuver, an optimal high-thrust strategy for interstellar spacecraft to brake and stay bound to the Sun. An optimal intercept of Earth would entail an arrival in late November or early December of 2025. Detection of a non-gravitational acceleration could also indicate an intent to intercept Jupiter, not far off the path of 3I/ATLAS, and a strategy to rendezvous with it after perihelion.
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Commentary from Jeff Childers (guest post on The Burning Platform) on the post by Avi Loeb (on 3I/ATLAS possibly being alien technology)

Something very weird —cosmically weird— is going on. Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb just co-authored a scientific paper hypothetically suggesting that the newly discovered interstellar object 3I/ATLAS might not be a rock at all. It might be… alien technology. He drafted a formal paper, pre-published on his Substack, and titled “Is the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Alien Technology?” Secure your grey alien Halloween mask, fasten your tinfoil hat, and prepare for turbulence.

Before you roll your eyes: Avi Loeb isn’t some wild-eyed crank on late-night AM radio. He’s the former chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and lead scientist of the Galileo Project. He’s a credentialed establishment figure—who just called for humanity to seriously consider that this object may evidence intent.


To be fair, Avi also recently published a lay-targeting but science-heavy book speculating about alien origins of our very first interstellar visitor, Oumuamua. Here’s the link to Avi’s slightly more lay-friendly Substack summary of his new paper.

The terrifying punchline is that Avi thinks evidence suggests there is a tiny but greater-than-zero possibility that 3i/Atlas is a weapon meant to destroy the Earth. Seriously. Using science. And he cited Pascal’s Wager to justify going public with his concerns. It’s better to be wrong and discredited than wrong and dead.

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Just for fun, since this is what our Harvard astrophysicist is doing, let’s stack the “ifs”:

If 3I/ATLAS is a probe that was sent, not a wandering rock;
if it deliberately flew in from the crowded backdrop of the galactic core, where early detection is almost impossible;
if it timed its arrival to thread a corridor past Venus, Mars, and Jupiter;
if it passed perihelion precisely behind the Sun, right where no telescope on Earth can track it; and
if it used that moment to execute a reverse Oberth maneuver, bleeding velocity to shift into a new trajectory…
… then we have a very different situation on our hands. We’re not dealing with a space rock.
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