Loeb masterfully uses genuine astronomical anomalies to challenge the scientific community's bias toward the mundane. While his leap to technological origins is a bold provocation, it serves as a necessary reminder that science requires both rigorous data and the courage to imagine the extraordinary.
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“Avi Loeb Reacts to NASA’s SHOCKING 3I/ATLAS Images”Added:
into what we just saw and heard.
>> Well, there wasn't much news, I must say. Um, an hour before that press conference, I was asked by a reporter, what do I expect? And I said, I don't expect big news and NASA will repeat the official mantra that Frii Atlas is a natural comet and that they were unable to process the data until now because of the government shutdown. And probably the high-rise image will show a fuzzy ball of light like the Hubble image.
But uh I hoped to be surprised and I was not.
>> Oh man.
>> But we did see a new data uh but nothing major in terms of the insights as to the nature of the object. Um there was data presented in addition to the one we already saw from the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Web Space Telescopes, Ferex Swift. I mean these are things we already witnessed. There was some new data from the Lucy spacecraft, Maven uh SOHO high-rise. Um but again all these uh images were uh fuzzy uh there was no new insight offered by them and of course one would like to analyze those images. I mean they detected for example hydrogen from the spectrograph on maven. Uh so that of course says say says something about the the production rate of water because hydrogen comes from the breakup of water molecules and one can also infer that from the detection of uh hydroxil radicals, oxygen and hydrogen molecules that were detected actually um a few weeks ago uh by a radio telescope um mircat and It was detected again today.
There was a report from early November.
So I mean these are details that can be combined to infer production rate of water. We already know that carbon dioxide based on web telescope data was uh much more abundant than than than water. And so um the main questions we have about reatlas were not really addressed. And the I would say that the data that was released over the past week or two after three Atlas came out of the direction of the sun. So we can observe it from Earth. That data is far more interesting. It shows jets, multiple jets going in different directions. And we're yet to see a big telescope imaging those jets. So far we saw amateur astronomers telescopes. Uh and so these images are intriguing.
The question of whether three atlas for example shows non-gravitational acceleration you know that's still being calculated debated uh that's another important insight about what happened to it when it came closest to the sun uh and of course as it gets closest to earth that will be on December 19th we'll have the best opportunity to use the hundreds of telescopes on earth and the Hubble and web space telescopes to get our best data on it. So, as far as I can tell, in terms of scientific output, there wasn't much uh offered >> in this press conference.
>> Plenty of questions for you. Uh one question that was just posed. Uh can you respond to their conversation about or their comments about it putting off nickel?
>> Well, uh so indeed that's one of the anomalies. I listed 12 anomalies about 3i Atlas. One of them is that you know the the detection of nickel was not supplemented by significant detection of iron and in fact the first detection of nickel had no iron just an upper limit.
Uh very extreme ratio of nickel to iron that was never seen before in any comet.
Uh and obviously that's puzzling because nickel and iron are produced in exploding stars in similar amounts. And in fact for the solar composition there is more iron than nickel. So um we've never seen something like that. And you know when we uh for example find nickel from the impact of asteroids that are nickel rich they are also iron rich that there is never a situation where it's mostly nickel and very little iron except for industrial production of of alloys nickel alloys that are used for aerospace applications. So I mean they are always seeing whatever data we get as a a signature of an unusual comet.
Okay. So no matter how unusual the chemical composition would be, they would say, well, it came from a different environment. What do you expect? Uh the main, you know, the main anomaly that I find extremely puzzling and they didn't even mention it is the size of the object. So I based on on the data that we have by now which uh is not just the web telescope data that they mentioned but other details. It looks like the object is at least 5 kilometers in diameter and maybe more. And that means that it's at least a thousand times more massive than the previous comet. We know it's it was a comet Borisov discovered in 2019 and and moreover it's about a million times more massive than Amu Mua the first interstellar object. So when you see the third object being a thousand times more massive than the second and a million times more massive than the first it should raise a a big question. How is that possible?
because we should have found a thousand borisovs and a million omu muas before finding one giant icy iceberg of the type that we found.
So, uh this should be really a puzzle and they should have mentioned it as a puzzle but they don't even mention that.
And the second is why do we have it in the plane of the planets? I mean obviously it's a great fortune that all the NASA observatories can look at it and they mention the fact that they look at it. They're really happy about the fact that they could monitor it all the time. But the fact that fact that they can monitor it all the time is really a miracle cuz only one in 500 incoming objects would be aligned so well with the ecliptic plane of the planets that allows all these NASA assets to be used.
>> So they don't comment about that. So all the things that appear extremely rare you know like all these features maybe they say something that is not well understood. So NASA, you know, these administrators basically are trying to portray an image of an unusual comet because it came from in a a different environment, but um they don't attend to the fact that there are extremely rare properties of this comet that should that should puzzle them that. So I think the appropriate response to that would be, you know, there there are very puzzling facts about this. It it's maybe it's a indeed it's a natural comet but it means that we don't understand the factories that make such things because if we get a such a big package that happens to be aligned with the plane of the planets and shows much more nickel than iron you know maybe there is something really fundamentally wrong with the way we think about the origin of this thing they don't even bring this up I mean I don't have an issue with them claiming it it must be natural but even if it's natural it seems to me that the main message is that you know we don't fully we are missing something. We don't know how such an object is generated created.
>> If it's not uh again we've we've got a ton of questions for you on on YouTube and I know you're um your time is tight today. Um Adam says if they're billions of years old like you said, wouldn't they have discovered a more efficient form of transportation rather than using a comet-like spacecraft? Uh wouldn't they have discovered faster than light travel, teleportation, wormhole, dimensional travel, etc. after billions of years? Uh that's why I'm skeptical on this whole object being of alien origin.
>> Well, this is a strange question because whoever asked this question is skeptical because of ideas that have nothing to do with what we know about physics. We don't know if it's possible to travel fast and light. In fact, Einstein's theory of relativity says it's not. So the question the person who asked the question says why couldn't they discover faster than light travel? Well because as far as we know it doesn't exist.
Okay. And the second is wormholes. As far as we know it doesn't exist. We don't know how to make a wormhole. We don't know if it's possible to make a wormhole because then you would build a time machine that would violate the laws of physics. So as far as we know such things do not exist. So you can't ask a question saying they would have discovered it because we don't know that such things exist. Okay. Now you can ask why wasn't it moving faster than 10 the minus 4 of the speed of light? You know in principle that's a good question. But if they were to move faster, we would never discover an object moving close to the speed of light because the telescopes would not record an object.
They would basically get a a smearing of the light from the object along a a line and it would be very dim. And the observers would dismiss it as an object.
So an object moving too fast, much faster than the typical speed of uh asteroids, comets in our solar system would be discarded. We will not hear about it. The observers will never report about it. So when you ask why don't we see things moving faster is because of a selection effect. Our observations are not tuned to detect such objects.
>> Okay. So uh according to Rizzle he says according to the trajectory it entered our solar system where did three eye atlas come from?
>> We don't know where it came from because that depends on the duration of the journey and we have no no clock on it to tell us how long the journey was. Uh the only thing we have is that it moves at a high speed when it entered the solar system relative to the local population of stars. So the claim is well maybe it came from an old star because old stars are kicked around and they reach higher speeds. But the problem with that proposition and I wrote a paper related to that is that there is a caveat because you could imagine a parent star that is moving slowly and then the ejection speed from that parent star was large.
So, we don't know if the ejection speed was large or the original host star was moving fast. And therefore, we can't tell the age. There is no way for us to tell the age of the object unless we assume that the object acquired or inherited the original speed of its parent star, which is an assumption. We don't know if it's true or not because we don't know what the ejection mechanism was to and where did this object come from within the the vicinity of that star.
>> Isaac asked why do we have virtually no highresolution images of the details in the surface of the moon and Mars? Don't we have the right people to clear that data?
Oh, we do have images of the surface of the moon and Mars, but the when you say not enough resolution, uh that is dictated by the aperture of the cameras that were used. So the there is the Mars or orbiter that is actually gave us detailed images of Mars. There was a lunar orbiter that gave us detailed images of the moon. that we can do much better and in the future hopefully there would be missions that would map those surfaces to much greater details and uh moreover as we go to these places we could map it from up close.
>> Robert says why do the jets and plumes that appear to be coming from three Atlas seem to not be influenced by a 16-hour rotation?
>> That's an excellent question. I asked the same. That's one of my anomalies.
you would expect um uh you know given the typical um speed of the material in those jets you would expect to see wiggles uh that we don't see and um somehow the the jets are uh tightly cimated. So this is an important puzzle that needs to be addressed again. Um, you know, we we gain new knowledge in science out of asking questions or paying attention to anomalies. We we don't learn much by saying, "Oh, it's a comet. Comets do strange things and therefore we shouldn't worry about it."
That's not the way we learn something new.
>> Lots of people bringing up how long it took them to release this data. Um, this one says, "Why would NASA have a big event to release a picture of a simple rock? And with almost 50 days without releasing anything, why should we believe them? They are known to alter their images all the time. Um, bring smart back. That's what they'd say.
>> Well, uh, I wouldn't necessarily suggest that they modify the images, but uh, you know, NASA is a big bureaucratic organization and a bureaucracy rules. Uh so if there is a government shutdown they may have given instructions not to release any data related to triatlas because they want to they want it to be processed through the headquarters. Uh they didn't uh do the same about other data. For example the high-rise um camera was taking images of Mars and releasing them you know a day later. Um, you can look at the high-rise website and you will see images rel that were released during the the shutdown. No problem at all. However, the three the the image of 3i Atlas was uh waiting for 45 days before we got to see it and it wasn't particularly revealing anything you know insightful about the nature of the object. So I I do think that um it's just the the NASA bureaucracy that set some rule about Fatlas. They wanted to have uh the the data publicly available after you know the the administrators have a chance to review it and I don't see anything beyond that. It's just the bureaucracy uh taking hostage the uh dissemination of scientific information. Uh, of course, if it was a an academic institution where there is no uh threat from from shutdown and even if there was a a university that was shut down, the scientists would still process it at their home and release the data immediately to the public, you know. So, it's a very different mentality. But, but in a government organization, the employees are not allowed to do anything to overrule what the administration tells them. even if uh they can easily process the data.
>> I'm going to try to get to two or three more questions. This one says, "Avi, do you think the 1977 signal could have been from three Atlas as it is reported to have come from the same general direction?"
>> Yeah, that's an excellent question again related to one of the anomalies in my list of 12 on my you can check my um latest essay on medium.com where I discuss all 12. Um so I actually encouraged the radio observers to look at triatas to check if there there is any radio transmission and today there was a report from Mircat the radio observatory uh there and again it's discussed in my essay today and they put an upper limit at a particular range of frequencies radio frequencies uh they observed it on November uh 5th and so the limit is just applicable to that particular date and over some range of frequencies and uh during that time they were able to set an upper limit on the power transmitted that as being less than that of a cell phone. So you can say that there was no cell phone on November 5th uh transmitting anything from 3i Atlas.
>> Okay. Um Dr. lobe. If ThreeI Atlas were to change course or if it sent out smaller spacecraft or fragments of itself, how long would it take to arrive to Earth? Thank you for all that you do.
>> Thank you. So, if it changed course at roughly the same speed, not making it much faster. Um, then it would take a couple of months or so, a few months depending on exactly the details. Uh, and in fact, that was worked out in a paper that I co-authored.
um at in the middle of July that was published by now in a peer-review journal uh along with Adam Hibbert and Adam Croll we considered the possibility that 3i Atlas is technological spacecraft and asked what kind of a velocity shift does it need to have in order to reach earth at a particular date and you can look at our plots and you will see for any target date there is a different velocity shift that it needs to acquire at an earlier time and and so we give all kinds of scenarios for that.
>> How will we know that the images are authentic and not doctorred?
>> We will never know that uh because we don't have access to the instruments and the flow of data. But we have to trust NASA scientists and you know science is based on trust. As you can tell these days, if you go online, you would see a lot of fake data, misinformation. You can't trust people. But there is a code of honor in science that uh data should never be fabricated by scientists. And um you know there are rare examples where such fake where fake data was was produced and the scientists were punished severely for that. So I would be really surprised if that happened here. Um I trust scientists unless proven differently. Um and so I would just assume this is the data they have especially because it's not very very impressive. Now it's you might say oh well maybe the original data was much more impressive. I would find it really hard to imagine that they would make the im images fuzzier than they actually are.
>> Okay. So what happens now? Now, is your team going to stay up all night and analyze what we just saw?
>> Yeah, I I have some collaborators that would look into the data and hope that a lobe we have waited to be able to talk to see what kind of information we can get from it. But as I said at the beginning, I don't expect big news from that because the quality of the data doesn't look impressive to me. uh it will just be marginal to what we already know and really it's really the coming weeks I think where we will get new insights to to free atlas.
>> Avi we always appreciate you. Thank you so much for um uh staying on with us and taking so many of our viewers questions from YouTube uh and for analyzing all that we just heard whether it was impressive or not.
>> Uh it will just be much I will always tell you what it's really the coming weeks I think where we see what you see is what you get. All right, let's leave it there, man. We always appreciate so much. Thank you so much for um staying on with us and taking so many of our viewers questions. We have waited to be able and for analyzing all the weather and finally we get some images from NASA. So they say they are opening a window into other solar systems. What was your reaction to what we just saw on Earth?
>> All right, let's leave it there.
There wasn't much news I must say. Um an hour before that press conference I was asked by a reporter what do I expect and I said I don't expect big news and NASA will repeat the official mantra that three atlas is a natural comment and that they were unable to process the data until now I was asked what do I expect I hope I don't surprise in the nature of the news.
Hallelujah.
Spectroraph on Maven. Uh so that of course says say says something about the the production rate of water because hydrogen comes from the breakup of water molecules and one can also infer that from the detection of uh hydroxil radicals, oxygen and hydrogen molecules that were detected actually um a few weeks ago uh by a radio telescope um mircat and It was detected again today.
There was a report from early November.
So I mean these are details that can be combined to infer production rate of water. We already know that carbon dioxide based on web telescope data was much more abundant than than water. And so um the main questions we have about three atlas were not really addressed.
And the I would say that the data that was released over the past week or two after three Atlas came out of the direction of the sun. So we can observe it from Earth. That data is far more interesting. It shows jets, multiple jets going in different directions. And we're yet to see a big telescope imaging those jets. So far we saw amateur astronomers telescopes. Uh and so these images are intriguing.
The question of whether three Atlas for example shows non-gravitational acceleration you know that's still being calculated debated that's another important insight about what happened to it when it came closest to the sun uh and of course as it gets closest to earth that will be on December 19th we'll have the best opportunity to use the hundreds of telescopes on earth and the Hubble and web space telescopes to get our best data on it. So, as far as I can tell, in terms of scientific output, there wasn't much uh offered in this press conference.
>> Plenty of questions for you. Uh, one question that was just posed. Uh, can you respond to their conversation about or their comments about it putting off nickel?
>> Well, uh, so indeed that's one of the anomalies. I listed 12 anomalies about 3i Atlas. One of them is that you know the the detection of nickel was not supplemented by significant detection of iron and in fact the first detection of nickel had no iron just an upper limit.
Uh very extreme ratio of nickel to iron that was never seen before in any comet.
Uh and obviously that's puzzling because nickel and iron are produced in exploding stars in similar amounts. And in fact for the solar composition there is more iron than nickel. So um we've never seen something like that. And you know when we uh for example find nickel from the impact of asteroids that are nickel rich they are also iron rich that there is never a situation where it's mostly nickel and very little iron except for industrial production of of alloys nickel alloys that are used for aerospace applications. So I mean they are always seeing um whatever data we get as a a signature of an unusual comet. Okay. So no matter how unusual the chemical composition would be they would say well it came from a different environment. What do you expect? Uh the main you know the main anomaly that I find the extremely puzzling and they didn't even mention it is the size of the object. So I based on on the data that we have by now which uh is not just the web telescope data that they mentioned but other details. It looks like the object is at least 5 kilometers in diameter and maybe more. And that means that it's at least a thousand times more massive than the previous comet. We know it's it was a comet Borisov discovered in 2019 and and moreover it's about a million times more massive than Amu Mua the first interstellar object. So when you see the third object being a thousand times more massive than the second and a million times more massive than the first it should raise a a big question. How is that possible?
because we should have found a thousand borisovs and a million omu muas before finding one giant icy iceberg of the type that we found.
So, uh this should be really a puzzle and they should have mentioned it as a puzzle but they don't even mention that.
And the second is why do we have it in the plane of the planets? I mean obviously it's a great fortune that all the NASA observatories can look at it and they mentioned the fact that they look at it they're really happy about the fact that they could monitor it all the time but the fact that fact that they can monitor it all the time is really a miracle cuz only one in 500 incoming objects would be aligned so well with the ecliptic plane of the planets that allows all these NASA assets to be used.
>> So they don't comment about that. So all the things that appear extremely rare you know like all these features maybe they say something that is not well understood. So NASA, you know, these administrators basically are trying to portray an image of an unusual comet because it came from in a a different environment, but um they don't attend to the fact that there are extremely rare properties of this comet that should that should puzzle them that. So I think the appropriate response to that would be, you know, there there are very puzzling facts about this. It it's maybe it's a indeed it's a natural comet but it means that we don't understand the factories that make such things because if we get a such a big package that happens to be aligned with the plane of the planets and shows much more nickel than iron you know maybe there is something really fundamentally wrong with the way we think about the origin of this thing they don't even bring this up I mean I don't have an issue with them claiming it it must be natural but even if it's natural it seems to me that the main message is that you know we don't fully we are missing something. We don't know how such an object is generated created.
>> If it's not uh again we've we've got a ton of questions for you on on YouTube and I know you're um your time is tight today. Um Adam says if they're billions of years old like you said wouldn't they have discovered a more efficient form of transportation rather than using a comet-like spacecraft? But wouldn't they have discovered faster than light travel, teleportation, wormhole dimensional travel, etc. after billions of years? Uh, that's why I'm skeptical on this whole object being of alien origin.
>> Well, this is a strange question because whoever asked this question is skeptical because of ideas that have nothing to do with what we know about physics. We don't know if it's possible to travel fast and light. In fact, Einstein's theory of relativity says it's not. So the question the person who asks the question says why couldn't they discover faster than light travel? Well because as far as we know it doesn't exist.
Okay. And the second is wormholes. As far as we know it doesn't exist. We don't know how to make a wormhole. We don't know if it's possible to make a wormhole because then you would build a time machine that would violate the laws of physics. So as far as we know such things do not exist. So you can't ask a question saying they would have discovered it because we don't know that such things exist. Okay. Now you can ask why wasn't it moving faster than 10 the minus 4 of the speed of light? You know in principle that's a good question. But if they were to move faster, we would never discover an object moving close to the speed of light because the telescopes would not record an object.
They would basically get a a smearing of the light from the object along a a line and it would be very dim. And the observers would dismiss it as an object.
So an object moving too fast, much faster than the typical speed of uh asteroids, comets in our solar system would be discarded. We will not hear about it. The observers will never report about it. So when you ask why don't we see things moving faster is because of a selection effect. Our observations are not tuned to detect such objects.
>> Okay. So uh according to Rizzle he says according to the trajectory it entered our solar system where did three eye atlas come from?
>> We don't know where it came from because that depends on the duration of the journey and we have no no clock on it to tell us how long the journey was. Uh the only thing we have is that it moves at a high speed when it entered the solar system relative to the local population of stars. So the claim is well maybe it came from an old star because old stars are kicked around and they reach higher speeds. But the problem with that proposition and I wrote a paper related to that is that there is a caveat because you could imagine a parent star that is moving slowly and then the ejection speed from that parent star was large.
So, we don't know if the ejection speed was large or the original host star was moving fast. And therefore, we can't tell the age. There is no way for us to tell the age of the object unless we assume that the object acquired or inherited the original speed of its parent star, which is an assumption. We don't know if it's true or not because we don't know what the ejection mechanism was to and where did this object come from within the the vicinity of that star.
>> Isaac asked why do we have virtually no highresolution images of the details in the surface of the moon and Mars? Don't we have the right people to clear that data?
>> Oh, we do have images of the surface of the moon and Mars. But the when you say not enough resolution uh that is dictated by the aperture of the cameras that were used. So the there is the Mars uh or orbiter that is actually gave us detailed images of Mars. There was a lunar orbiter that gave us detailed images of the moon. But we can do much better and in the future hopefully there would be missions that would map those surfaces to much greater details. And moreover, as we go to the these places, we could map it from up close.
>> Robert says, "Why do the jets and plumes that appear to be coming from three Atlas seem to not be influenced by a 16-hour rotation?"
>> That's an excellent question. I asked the same. That's one of my anomalies.
you would expect um uh you know given the typical um speed of the material in those jets you would expect to see wiggles uh that we don't see and um somehow the the jets are uh tightly cimated. So this is an important puzzle that needs to be addressed. Again, um you know, we we gain new knowledge in science out of asking questions or paying attention to anomalies. We we don't learn much by saying, "Oh, it's a comet. Comets do strange things and therefore we shouldn't worry about it."
That's not the way we learn something new.
>> Lots of people bringing up how long it took them to release this data. Um this one says, "Why would NASA have a big event to release a picture of a simple rock? And with almost 50 days without releasing anything, why should we believe them? They are known to alter their images all the time. Um, bring smart back. That's what they'd say.
>> Well, uh, I wouldn't necessarily suggest that they modify the images, but uh, you know, NASA is a big bureaucratic organization and a bureaucracy rules. Uh so if there is a government shutdown they may have given instructions not to release any data related to triatlas because they want to they want it to be processed through the headquarters. Uh they didn't uh do the same about other data. For example the high-rise um camera was taking images of Mars and releasing them you know a day later. Um, you can look at the high-rise website and you will see images rel that were released during the the shutdown. No problem at all. However, the three the the image of three Atlas was uh waiting for 45 days before we got to see it and it wasn't particularly revealing anything, you know, insightful about the nature of the object. So I I do think that um it's just the the NASA bureaucracy that set some rule about FA Atlas. They wanted to have uh the the data publicly available after you know the the administrators have a chance to review it and I don't see anything beyond that. It's just the bureaucracy uh taking hostage the uh dissemination of scientific information. Uh, of course, if it was an academic institution where there is no uh threat from from shutdown and even if there was a a university that was shut down, the scientists would still process it at their home and release the data immediately to the public, you know. So it's a very different mentality but but in a government organization the employees are not allowed to do anything to overrule what the administration tells them even if uh they can easily process the data.
>> I'm going to try to get to two or three more questions. This one says, "Avi, do you think the 1977 signal could have been from three Atlas as it is reported to have come from the same general direction?"
>> Yeah, that's an excellent question again related to one of the anomalies in my list of 12 on my you can check my um latest essay on medium.com where I discuss all 12. Um so I actually encouraged the radio observers to look at Friatas to check if there there is any radio transmission and today there was a report from Mircat the radio observatory uh there and again it's discussed in my essay today and they put an upper limit at a particular range of frequencies radio frequencies uh they observed it on November uh 5th and so the limit is just applicable to that particular date and over some range of frequencies and uh during that time they were able to set an upper limit on the power transmitted that as being less than that of a cell phone. So you can say that there was no cell phone on November 5th uh transmitting anything from 3i Atlas.
>> Okay. Um Dr. lobe. If ThreeI Atlas were to change course or if it sent out smaller spacecraft or fragments of itself, how long would it take to arrive to Earth? Thank you for all that you do.
>> Thank you. So, if it changed course at roughly the same speed, not making it much faster. Um, then it would take a couple of months or so, a few months depending on exactly the details. Uh, and in fact, that was worked out in a paper that I co-authored.
um at in the middle of July that was published by now in a peer-review journal uh along with u Adam Hibbert and Adam Croll we considered the possibility that 3 atlas is technological spacecraft and asked what kind of a velocity shift does it need to have in order to reach earth at a particular date and you can look at our plots and you will see for any target date there is a different velocity shift that it needs to acquire at an earlier time and and so we give all kinds of scenarios for that.
>> How will we know that the images are authentic and not doctorred?
>> We will never know that uh because we don't have access to the instruments and the flow of data. But we have to trust NASA scientists and you know science is based on trust. As you can tell these days, if you go online, you would see a lot of fake data, misinformation, you can't trust people. But there is a code of honor in science that uh data should never be fabricated by scientists and um you know there are rare examples where such fake where fake data was was produced and the scientists were punished severely for that. So I would be really surprised if that happened here. Um I trust scientists unless proven differently. Um and so I would just assume this is the data they have especially because it's not very very impressive. Now it's you might say oh well maybe the original data was much more impressive. I would find it really hard to imagine that they would make the im images fuzzier than they actually are.
>> Okay. So what happens now? Now, is your team going to stay up all night and analyze what we just saw?
>> Yeah, I I have some collaborators that would look into the data. I hope we will have access to that data uh and analyze it, see what kind of information we can get from it. But as I said at the beginning, I don't expect big news from that because the quality of the data doesn't look impressive to me. uh it will just be marginal to what we already know and really it's really the coming weeks I think where we will get new insights to to free Atlas.
>> AI we always appreciate you. Thank you so much for um uh staying on with us and taking so many of our viewers questions from YouTube uh and for analyzing all that we just heard whether it was impressive or not.
>> Thanks for having me. I will always tell you what I think and uh with me what you see is what you get.
>> All right, let's leave it there, man.
Thank you so much for your time.
Appreciate it. Go ahead and bring in Harvard professor Avi Lobo. We have waited to be able to talk to you about this threeey atlas. And finally, we get some images from NASA. So, they say they are um opening a window into other solar systems. What was your reaction to what we just saw and heard?
Well, uh, there wasn't much news, I must say. Um, an hour before that press conference, I was asked by a reporter, what do I expect? And I said, I don't expect big news and NASA will repeat the official mantra that Frii Atlas is a natural comet and that they were unable to process the data until now because of the government shutdown. And probably the high-rise image will show a fuzzy ball of light like the Hubble image.
But uh I hoped to be surprised and I was not.
>> Oh man.
>> Uh but we did see a new data uh but nothing major in terms of the insights as to the nature of the object. Um there was data presented in addition to the one we already saw from the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Web Space Telescopes, Ferex, Swift test. I mean these are things we already witnessed.
There was some new data from the Lucy spacecraft, Maven uh SOHO high-rise. Um but again all these uh images were uh fuzzy uh there was no new insight offered by them and of course one would like to analyze those images. I mean they detected for example hydrogen from the spectrograph on maven. Uh so that of course says say says something about the the production rate of water because hydrogen comes from the breakup of water molecules and one can also infer that from the detection of uh hydroxil radicals, oxygen and hydrogen molecules that were detected actually um a few weeks ago uh by a radio telescope um mircat and it was detected again today.
There was a report from uh early November. So I mean these are details that can be combined to infer production rate of water. We already know that carbon dioxide based on web telescope data was uh much more abundant than than than water. And so um the main questions we have about three were not really addressed. And the I would say that the data that was released over the past week or two after three Atlas came out of the direction of the sun. So we can observe it from Earth. That data is far more interesting. It shows jets, multiple jets going in different directions. And we're yet to see a big telescope imaging those jets. So far we saw amateur astronomers telescopes. Uh and so these images are intriguing.
The question of whether three Atlas for example shows non-gravitational acceleration you know that's still being calculated debated that's another important insight about what happened to it when it came closest to the sun uh and of course as it gets closest to earth that will be on December 19th we'll have the best opportunity to use the hundreds of telescopes on earth and the Hubble and web space telescopes to get our best data on it. So, as far as I can tell, in terms of scientific output, there wasn't much uh offered >> in this press conference.
>> Plenty of questions for you. Uh one question that was just posed. Uh can you respond to their conversation about or their comments about it putting off nickel?
>> Well, uh so indeed that's one of the anomalies. I listed 12 anomalies about 3i Atlas. One of them is that you know the the detection of nickel was not supplemented by significant detection of iron and in fact the first detection of nickel had no iron just an upper limit.
Uh very extreme ratio of nickel to iron that was never seen before in any comet.
Uh and obviously that's puzzling because nickel and iron are produced in exploding stars in similar amounts. And in fact for the solar composition there is more iron than nickel. So um we've never seen something like that. And you know when we uh for example find nickel from the impact of asteroids that are nickel rich. They are also iron rich that there is never a situation where it's mostly nickel and very little iron except for industrial production of of alloys nickel alloys that are used for aerospace applications. So I mean they are always seeing um whatever data we get as a a signature of an unusual comet. Okay. So no matter how unusual the chemical composition would be, they would say well it came from a different environment. What do you expect? Uh the main you know the main anomaly that I find the extremely puzzling and they didn't even mention it is the size of the object. So I based on on the data that we have by now which uh is not just the web telescope data that they mentioned but other details. It looks like the object is at least 5 kilometers in diameter and maybe more. And that means that it's at least a thousand times more massive than the previous comet. We know it's it was a comet Borisov discovered in 2019 and and moreover it's about a million times more massive than Amu Mua the first interstellar object. So when you see the third object being a thousand times more massive than the second and a million times more massive than the first it should raise a big question. How is that possible?
because we should have found a thousand borisovs and a million omuam muas before finding one giant icy iceberg of the type that we found.
So, uh this should be really a puzzle and they should have mentioned it as a puzzle but they don't even mention that.
And the second is why do we have it in the plane of the planets? I mean obviously it's a great fortune that all the NASA observatories can look at it and they mentioned the fact that they look at it they're really happy about the fact that they could monitor it all the time but the fact that fact that they can monitor it all the time is really a miracle cuz only one in 500 incoming objects would be aligned so well with the ecliptic plane of the planets that allows all these NASA assets to be used so they don't comment about that so all the things that appear extremely rare you know like all these features maybe they say something that is not well understood. So NASA, you know, these administrators basically are trying to portray an image of an unusual comet because it came from an in a a different environment, but um they don't attend to the fact that there are extremely rare properties of this comet that should that should puzzle them that. So I think the appropriate response to that would be, you know, there there are very puzzling facts about this. It it is maybe it's a indeed it's a natural comet but it means that we don't understand the factories that make such things because if we get a such a big package that happens to be aligned with the plane of the planets and shows much more nickel than iron you know maybe there is something really fundamentally wrong with the way we think about the origin of this thing they don't even bring this up I mean I don't have an issue with them claiming it it must be natural but even if it's natural it seems to me that the main message is that you know we don't fully we are missing something. We don't know how such an object is generated created.
>> If it's not uh again we've we've got a ton of questions for you on on YouTube and I know you're um your time is tight today. Um Adam says if they're billions of years old like you said wouldn't they have discovered a more efficient form of transportation rather than using a comet-like spacecraft? Wouldn't they have discovered faster than light travel, teleportation, wormhole, dimensional travel, etc. after billions of years? Uh, that's why I'm skeptical on this whole object being of alien origin.
>> Well, this is a strange question because whoever asked this question is skeptical because of ideas that have nothing to do with what we know about physics. We don't know if it's possible to travel fast and light. In fact, Einstein's theory of relativity says it's not. So the question the person who asks the question says why couldn't they discover faster than light travel? Well because as far as we know it doesn't exist.
Okay. And the second is wormholes. As far as we know it doesn't exist. We don't know how to make a wormhole. We don't know if it's possible to make a wormhole because then you would build a time machine that would violate the laws of physics. So as far as we know such things do not exist. So you can't ask a question saying they would have discovered it because we don't know that such things exist. Okay. Now you can ask why wasn't it moving faster than 10 to the minus 4 of the speed of light? You know in principle that's a good question. But if they were to move faster, we would never discover an object moving close to the speed of light because the telescopes would not record an object. They would basically get a a smearing of the light from the object along a a line and it would be very dim. and the observers would dismiss it as an object. So an object moving too fast, much faster than the typical speed of uh asteroids, comets in our solar system would be discarded. We will not hear about it. The observers will never report about it. So when you ask why don't we see things moving faster is because of a selection effect.
Our observations are not tuned to detect such objects.
>> Okay. So uh according to Rizzle he says according to the trajectory it entered our solar system where did three I atlas come from >> we don't know where it came from because that depends on the duration of the journey and we have no no clock on it to tell us how long the journey was. Uh the only thing we have is that it moves at a high speed when it entered the solar system relative to the local population of stars. So the claim is well maybe it came from an old star because old stars are kicked around and they reach higher speeds. But the problem with that proposition and I wrote a paper related to that is that there is a caveat because you could imagine a parent star that is moving slowly and then the ejection speed from that parent star was large.
So, we don't know if the ejection speed was large or the original host star was moving fast. And therefore, we can't tell the age. There is no way for us to tell the age of the object unless we assume that the object acquired or inherited the original speed of its parent star, which is an assumption. We don't know if it's true or not because we don't know what the ejection mechanism was to and where did this object come from within the the vicinity of that star.
>> Isaac asked why do we have virtually no highresolution images of the details in the surface of the moon and Mars? Don't we have the right people to clear that data?
>> Oh, we do have images of the surface of the moon and Mars. But the when you say not enough resolution uh that is dictated by the aperture of the cameras that were used. So the there is the Mars uh or orbiter that is actually gave us detailed images of Mars. There was a lunar orbiter that gave us detailed images of the moon. But we can do much better and in the future hopefully there would be missions that would map those surfaces to much greater details. And uh moreover, as we go to the these places, we could map it from up close.
>> Robert says, "Why do the jets and plumes that appear to be coming from three Atlas seem to not be influenced by a 16-hour rotation?"
>> That's an excellent question. I asked the same. That's one of my anomalies.
you would expect um uh you know given the typical um speed of the material in those jets you would expect to see wiggles uh that we don't see and somehow the the jets are uh tightly cumated. So this is an important puzzle that needs to be addressed again. Um, you know, we we gain new knowledge in science out of asking questions or paying attention to anomalies. We we don't learn much by saying, "Oh, it's a comet. Comets do strange things and therefore we shouldn't worry about it." That's not the way we learn something new.
>> Lots of people bringing up how long it took them to release this data. Um, this one says, "Why would NASA have a big event to release a picture of a simple rock? And with almost 50 days without releasing anything, why should we believe them? They are known to alter their images all the time. Um, bring smart back. That's what they'd say.
>> Well, uh, I wouldn't necessarily suggest that they modify the images, but uh, you know, NASA is a big bureaucratic organization and a bureaucracy rules. Uh so if there is a government shutdown they may have given instructions not to release any data related to triatlas because they want to they wanted to be processed through the headquarters. Uh they didn't uh do the same about other data. For example the high-rise um camera was taking images of Mars and releasing them you know a day later. Um, you can look at the high-rise website and you will see images rel that were released during the the shutdown. No problem at all. However, the three the the image of 3i Atlas was uh waiting for 45 days before we got to see it and it wasn't particularly revealing anything, you know, insightful about the nature of the object. So I I do think that um it's just the the NASA bureaucracy that set some rule about FA Atlas. They wanted to have uh the the data publicly available after you know the the administrators have a chance to review it and I don't see anything beyond that. It's just the bureaucracy uh taking hostage the uh dissemination of scientific information. Uh, of course, if it was an academic institution where there is no uh threat from from shutdown and even if there was a a university that was shut down, the scientists would still process it at their home and release the data immediately to the public, you know. So, it's a very different mentality. But, but in a government organization, the employees are not allowed to do anything to overrule what the administration tells them. even if uh they can easily process the data.
>> I'm going to try to get to two or three more questions. This one says, "Ai, do you think the 1977 signal could have been from three Atlas as it is reported to have come from the same general direction?"
>> Yeah, that's an excellent question again related to one of the anomalies in my list of 12 on my you can check my um latest essay on medium.com where I discuss all 12. Um so I actually encouraged the radio observers to look at threeas to check if there there is any radio transmission and today there was a report from Mircat the radio observatory uh there and again it's discussed in my essay today and they put an upper limit at a particular range of frequencies radio frequencies uh they observed it on November uh 5th and so the limit is just applicable to that particular date and over some range of frequencies and uh during that time they were able to set an upper limit on the power transmitted that as being less than that of a cell phone. So you can say there was no cell phone on November 5th uh transmitting anything from 3i Atlas.
>> Okay. Um Dr. lobe. If ThreeI Atlas were to change course or if it sent out smaller spacecraft or fragments of itself, how long would it take to arrive to Earth? Thank you for all that you do.
>> Thank you. So, if it changed course at roughly the same speed, not making it much faster. Um, then it would take a couple of months or so, a few months depending on exactly the details. Uh, and in fact, that was worked out in a paper that I co-authored.
um at in the middle of July that was published by now in a peer-review journal uh along with uh Adam Hibbert and Adam Croll we considered the possibility that 3AI Atlas is technological spacecraft and asked what kind of a velocity shift does it need to have in order to reach Earth at a particular date and you can look at our plots and you will see for any target date there is a different velocity shift that it needs to acquire at an earlier time and and so we give all kinds of scenarios for that.
>> How will we know that the images are authentic and not doctorred?
>> We will never know that uh because we don't have access to the instruments and the flow of data. But we have to trust NASA scientists and you know science is based on trust. As you can tell these days, if you go online, you would see a lot of fake data, misinformation. You can't trust people. But there is a code of honor in science that uh data should never be fabricated by scientists. And um you know there are rare examples where such fake where fake data was was produced and the scientists were punished severely for that. So I would be really surprised if that happened here. Um I trust scientists unless proven differently. Um and so I would just assume this is the data they have especially because it's not very very impressive. Now it's you might say oh well maybe the original data was much more impressive. I would find it really hard to imagine that they would make the im images fuzzier than they actually are.
>> Okay. So what happens now? Is your team going to stay up all night and analyze what we just saw?
>> Yeah, I I have some collaborators that would look into the data. I hope we will have access to that data uh and analyze it, see what kind of information we can get from it. But as I said at the beginning, I don't expect big news from that because the quality of the data doesn't look impressive to me. uh it will just be marginal to what we already know and really it's really the coming weeks I think where we will get new insights to to Frier Atlas.
>> AI we always appreciate you. Thank you so much for um uh staying on with us and taking so many of our viewers questions from YouTube uh and for analyzing all that we just heard whether it was impressive or not.
>> Thanks for having me. I will always tell you what I think and uh with me what you see is what you get.
>> All right, let's leave it there, man.
Thank you so much for your time.
Appreciate it. Go ahead and bring in Harvard professor Avi Lobo. We have waited to be able to talk to you about this threeey atlas. And finally, we get some images from NASA. So, they say they are um opening a window into other solar systems. What was your reaction to what we just saw and heard?
Well, uh, there wasn't much news, I must say. Um, an hour before that press conference, I was asked by a reporter, "What do I expect?" And I said, "I don't expect big news and NASA will repeat the official mantra that Frii Atlas is a natural comet and that they were unable to process the data until now because of the government shutdown." And probably the high-rise image will show a fuzzy ball of light like the Hubble image.
But uh I hoped to be surprised and I was not.
>> Oh man.
>> Uh but we did see a new data uh but nothing major in terms of the insights as to the nature of the object. Um there was data presented in addition to the one we already saw from the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Web Space Telescopes, Ferex, Swift test. I mean these are things we already witnessed.
There was some new data from the Lucy spacecraft, Maven uh SOHO high-rise. Um but again all these uh images were uh fuzzy. Uh there was no new insight offered by them and of course one would like to analyze those images. I mean they detected for example hydrogen from the spectrograph on maven. Uh so that of course says say says something about the the production rate of water because hydrogen comes from the breakup of water molecules and one can also infer that from the detection of uh hydroxil radicals, oxygen and hydrogen molecules that were detected actually um a few weeks ago uh by a radio telescope um mircat and It was detected again today.
There was a report from early November.
So I mean these are details that can be combined to infer production rate of water. We already know that carbon dioxide based on web telescope data was uh much more abundant than than water.
And so um the main questions we have about three atlas were not really addressed.
And the I would say that the data that was released over the past week or two after three Atlas came out of the direction of the sun. So we can observe it from Earth. That data is far more interesting. It shows jets, multiple jets going in different directions. And we're yet to see a big telescope imaging those jets. So far we saw amateur astronomers telescopes. Uh and so these images are intriguing.
uh the question of whether three atlas for example shows non-gravitational acceleration you know that's still being calculated debated uh that's another important insight about what happened to it when it came closest to the sun uh and of course as it gets closest to earth that will be on December 19th we'll have the best opportunity to use the hundreds of telescopes on earth and the Hubble and web space telescope s to get our best data on it. So, as far as I can tell, in terms of scientific output, there wasn't much uh offered in this press conference.
>> Plenty of questions for you. Uh one question that was just posed. Uh can you respond to their conversation about or their comments about it putting off nickel?
>> Well, uh so indeed that's one of the anomalies. I listed 12 anomalies about 3i Atlas. One of them is that you know the the detection of nickel was not supplemented by significant detection of iron. And in fact the first detection of nickel had no iron just an upper limit.
Uh very extreme ratio of nickel to iron that was never seen before in any comet.
Uh and obviously that's puzzling because nickel and iron are produced in exploding stars in similar amounts. And in fact for the solar composition there is more iron than nickel. So um we've never seen something like that. And you know when we uh for example find nickel from the impact of asteroids that are nickel rich they are also iron rich that there is never a situation where it's mostly nickel and very little iron except for industrial production of of alloys nickel alloys that are used for aerospace applications. So I mean they are always seeing whatever data we get as a a signature of an unusual comet.
Okay. So no matter how unusual the chemical composition would be, they would say, well, it came from a different environment. What do you expect? Uh the main, you know, the main anomaly that I find the extremely puzzling and they didn't even mention it is the size of the object. So I based on on the data that we have by now which uh is not just the web telescope data that they mentioned but uh other details. It looks like the object is at least 5 kilometers in diameter and maybe more.
And that means that it's at least a thousand times more massive than the previous comet. We know it's it was a comet Borisov discovered in 2019 and and moreover it's about a million times more massive than Amu Mua the first interstellar object. So when you see the third object being a thousand times more massive than the second and a million times more massive than the first it should raise a big question. How is that possible?
because we should have found a thousand borisovs and a million omuam muas before finding one giant icy iceberg of the type that we found.
So, uh this should be really a puzzle and they should have mentioned it as a puzzle but they don't even mention that.
And the second is why do we have it in the plane of the planets? I mean obviously it's a great fortune that all the NASA observatories can look at it and they mentioned the fact that they look at it they're really happy about the fact that they could monitor it all the time but the fact that fact that they can monitor it all the time is really a miracle cuz only one in 500 incoming objects would be aligned so well with the ecliptic plane of the planets that allows all these NASA assets to be used.
>> So they don't comment about that. So all the things that appear extremely rare you know like all these features maybe they say something that is not well understood. So NASA, you know, these administrators basically are trying to portray an image of an unusual comet because it came from an in a a different environment, but um they don't attend to the fact that there are extremely rare properties of this comet that should that should puzzle them that. So I think the appropriate response to that would be, you know, there there are very puzzling facts about this. It it's maybe it's a indeed it's a natural comet but it means that we don't understand the factories that make such things because if we get a such a big package that happens to be aligned with the plane of the planets and shows much more nickel than iron you know maybe there is something really fundamentally wrong with the way we think about the origin of these things they don't even bring this up I mean I don't have an issue with them claiming it it must be natural but even if it's natural it seems to me that the main message is that you know we don't fully we are missing something.
We don't know how such an object is generated created.
>> If it's not uh again we've we've got a ton of questions for you on on YouTube and I know you're um your time is tight today. Um Adam says if they're billions of years old like you said wouldn't they have discovered a more efficient form of transportation rather than using a comet-like spacecraft? Wouldn't they have discovered faster than light travel, teleportation, wormhole, dimensional travel, etc. after billions of years? Uh, that's why I'm skeptical on this whole object being of alien origin.
>> Well, this is a strange question because whoever asked this question is skeptical because of ideas that have nothing to do with what we know about physics. We don't know if it's possible to travel faster than light. In fact, Einstein's theory of relativity says it's not. So the question the person who asks the question says why couldn't they discover faster than light travel? Well because as far as we know it doesn't exist.
Okay. And the second is wormholes. As far as we know it doesn't exist. We don't know how to make a wormhole. We don't know if it's possible to make a wormhole because then you would build a time machine that would violate the laws of physics. So as far as we know such things do not exist. So you can't ask a question saying they would have discovered it because we don't know that such things exist. Okay. Now you can ask why wasn't it moving faster than 10 the minus4 of the speed of light? You know in principle that's a good question. But if they were to move faster, we would never discover an object moving close to the speed of light because the telescopes would not record an object.
They would basically get a a smearing of the light from the object along a a line and it would be very dim. And the observers would dismiss it as an object.
So an object moving too fast, much faster than the typical speed of uh asteroids, comets in our solar system would be discarded. We will not hear about it. The observers will never report about it. So when you ask why don't we see things moving faster is because of a selection effect. Our observations are not tuned to detect such objects.
>> Okay. So uh according to Rizzle he says according to the trajectory it entered our solar system where did three eye atlas come from?
>> We don't know where it came from because that depends on the duration of the journey and we have no no clock on it to tell us how long the journey was. Uh the only thing we have is that it moves at a high speed when it entered the solar system relative to the local population of stars. So the claim is well maybe it came from an old star because old stars are kicked around and they reach higher speeds. But the problem with that proposition and I wrote a paper related to that is that there is a caveat because you could imagine a parent star that is moving slowly and then the ejection speed from that parent star was large.
So we don't know if the ejection speed was large or the original host star was moving fast. And therefore we can't tell the age. There is no way for us to tell the age of the object unless we assume that the object acquired or inherited the original speed of its parent star which is an assumption. We don't know if it's true or not because we don't know what the ejection mechanism was to and where did this object come from within the the vicinity of that star.
>> Isaac asked why do we have virtually no highresolution images of the details in the surface of the moon and Mars? Don't we have the right people to clear that data?
>> Oh, we do have images of the surface of the moon and Mars. But the when you say not enough resolution uh that is dictated by the aperture of the cameras that were used. So the there is the Mars uh or orbiter that is actually gave us detailed images of Mars. There was a lunar orbiter that gave us detailed images of the moon. But we can do much better and in the future hopefully there would be missions that would map those surfaces to much greater details. And uh moreover, as we go to the these places, we could map it uh from up close.
>> Robert says, "Why do the jets and plumes that appear to be coming from three Atlas seem to not be influenced by a 16-hour rotation?"
>> That's an excellent question. I asked the same. That's one of my anomalies.
you would expect um uh you know given the typical um uh speed of the material in those jets you would expect to see wiggles uh that we don't see and um somehow the the jets are uh tightly cumated. So this is an important puzzle that needs to be addressed. Again, um you know, we we gain new knowledge in science out of asking questions or paying attention to anomalies. We we don't learn much by saying, "Oh, it's a comet. Comets do strange things and therefore we shouldn't worry about it." That's not the way we learn something new.
>> Lots of people bringing up how long it took them to release this data. Um this one says, "Why would NASA have a big event to release a picture of a simple rock? And with almost 50 days without releasing anything, why should we believe them? They are known to alter their images all the time. Um, bring Smart back. That's what they'd say.
>> Well, uh, I wouldn't necessarily suggest that they modify the images, but uh, you know, NASA is a big bureaucratic organization and a bureaucracy rules. Uh so if there is a government shutdown they may have given instructions not to release any data related to triatlas because they want to they want it to be processed through the headquarters. Uh they didn't uh do the same about other data. For example the high-rise um camera was taking images of Mars and releasing them you know a day later. Um, you can look at the high-rise website and you will see images rel that were released during the the shutdown. No problem at all. However, the three the the image of three Atlas was uh waiting for 45 days before we got to see it and it wasn't particularly revealing anything, you know, insightful about the nature of the object. So I I do think that um it's just the the NASA bureaucracy that set some rule about FA Atlatas. They wanted to have uh the the data publicly available after you know the the administrators have a chance to review it and I don't see anything beyond that. It's just the bureaucracy uh taking hostage the uh dissemination of scientific information. Uh, of course, if it was an academic institution where there is no uh threat from from shutdown and even if there was a a university that was shut down, the scientists would still process it at their home and release the data immediately to the public, you know. So, it's a very different mentality. But, but in a government organization, the employees are not allowed to do anything to overrule what the administration tells them. even if uh they can easily process the data.
>> I'm going to try to get to two or three more questions. This one says, AI, do you think the 1977 signal could have been from three Atlas as it is reported to have come from the same general direction?
>> Yeah, that's an excellent question again related to one of the anomalies in my list of 12 on my you can check my um latest essay on medium.com where I discuss all 12. Um so I actually encouraged the radio observers to look at three atlas to check if there there is any radio transmission and today there was a report from Mircat the radio observatory uh there and again it's discussed in my essay today and they put an upper limit at a particular range of frequencies radio frequencies uh they observed it on November uh 5th and so the limit is just applicable to that particular date and over some range of frequencies and uh during that time they were able to set an upper limit on the power transmitted that as being less than that of a cell phone. So you can say there was no cell phone on November 5th uh transmitting anything from 3i Atlas.
>> Okay. Um Dr. lobe. If ThreeI Atlas were to change course or if it sent out smaller spacecraft or fragments of itself, how long would it take to arrive to Earth? Thank you for all that you do.
>> Thank you. So, if it changed course at roughly the same speed, not making it much faster. Um, then it would take a couple of months or so, a few months depending on exactly the details. Uh, and in fact, that was worked out in a paper that I co-authored.
um at in the middle of July that was published by now in a peer-review journal uh along with uh Adam Hibbert and Adam Croll we considered the possibility that 3i Atlas is technological spacecraft and asked what kind of a velocity shift does it need to have in order to reach earth at a particular date and you can look at our plots and you will see for any target date there is a different velocity shift that it needs to acquire at an earlier time and and so we give all kinds of scenarios for that.
>> How will we know that the images are authentic and not doctorred?
>> We will never know that uh because we don't have access to the instruments and the flow of data. But we have to trust NASA scientists and you know science is based on trust. As you can tell these days, if you go online, you would see a lot of fake data, misinformation. You can't trust people. But there is a code of honor in science that uh data should never be fabricated by scientists. And um you know there are rare examples where such fake where fake data was was produced and the scientists were punished severely for that. So I would be really surprised if that happened here. Um I trust scientists unless proven differently. Um and so I would just assume this is the data they have especially because it's not very very impressive. Now it's you might say oh well maybe the original data was much more impressive. I would find it really hard to imagine that they would make the im images fuzzier than they actually are.
>> Okay. So what happens now? Is your team going to stay up all night and analyze what we just saw?
>> Yeah, I I have some collaborators that would look into the data. I hope we will have access to that data uh and analyze it, see what kind of information we can get from it. But as I said at the beginning, I don't expect big news from that because the quality of the data doesn't look impressive to me. uh it will just be marginal to what we already know and really it's really the coming weeks I think where we will get new insights to to Atlas.
>> Aby we always appreciate you. Thank you so much for um uh staying on with us and taking so many of our viewers questions from YouTube uh and for analyzing all that we just heard whether it was impressive or not.
>> Thanks for having me. I will always tell you what I think and uh with me what you see is what you get.
>> All right, let's leave it there, man.
Thank you so much for your time.
Appreciate it. Go ahead and bring in Harvard professor Avi Lobo. We have waited to be able to talk to you about this threeey atlas. And finally, we get some images from NASA. So, they say they are um opening a window into other solar systems. What was your reaction to what we just saw and heard?
Well, uh, there wasn't much news, I must say. Um, an hour before that press conference, I was asked by a reporter, what do I expect? And I said, I don't expect big news and NASA will repeat the official mantra that Friatlas is a natural comet and that they were unable to process the data until now because of the government shutdown. And probably the high-rise image will show a fuzzy ball of light like the Hubble image.
But I hoped to be surprised and I was not.
>> Oh man.
>> Uh but we did see a new data uh but nothing major in terms of the insights as to the nature of the object. Um there was data presented in addition to the one we already saw from the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Web Space Telescopes, Ferex, Swift test. I mean these are things we already witnessed.
There was some new data from the Lucy spacecraft, the Maven uh SOHO high-rise.
Um but again all these uh images were uh fuzzy. Uh there was no new insight offered by them and of course one would like to analyze those images. I mean they detected for example hydrogen from the spectrograph on maven. Uh so that of course says say says something about the the production rate of water because hydrogen comes from the break up of water molecules and one can also infer that from the detection of uh hydroxil radicals, oxygen and hydrogen molecules that were detected actually um a few weeks ago uh by a radio telescope um mircat and It was detected again today.
There was a report from early November.
So I mean these are details that can be combined to infer production rate of water. We already know that carbon dioxide based on web telescope data was uh much more abundant than than than water. And so um the main questions we have about three atlas were not really addressed.
And the I would say that the data that was released over the past week or two after 3i Atlas came out of the direction of the sun. So we can observe it from Earth. That data is far more interesting. It shows jets, multiple jets going in different directions. And we're yet to see a big telescope imaging those jets. So far we saw amateur astronomers telescopes. Uh and so these images are intriguing.
uh the question of whether 3i Atlas for example shows non-gravitational acceleration you know that's still being calculated debated uh that's another important insight about what happened to it when it came closest to the sun uh and of course as it gets closest to earth that will be on December 19th we'll have the best opportunity to use the hundreds of telescopes on earth and the Hubble and web space telescopes to get our best data on it. So, as far as I can tell, in terms of scientific output, there wasn't much uh offered >> in this uh press conference.
>> Plenty of questions for you. Uh one question that was just posed. Uh can you respond to their conversation about or their comments about it putting off nickel?
>> Well, uh so indeed that's one of the anomalies. I listed 12 anomalies about 3i Atlas. One of them is that you know the the detection of nickel was not supplemented by significant detection of iron. And in fact the first detection of nickel had no iron just an upper limit.
Uh very extreme ratio of nickel to iron that was never seen before in any comet.
Uh and obviously that's puzzling because nickel and iron are produced in exploding stars in similar amounts. And in fact for the solar composition there is more iron than nickel. So um we've never seen something like that. And you know when we uh for example find nickel from the impact of asteroids that are nickel rich they are also iron rich that there is never a situation where it's mostly nickel and very little iron except for industrial production of of alloys nickel alloys that are used for aerospace applications. So I mean they are always seeing whatever data we get as a a signature of an unusual comet.
Okay. So no matter how unusual the chemical composition would be they would say well it came from a different environment. What do you expect? Uh the main you know the main anomaly that I find the extremely puzzling and they didn't even mention it is the size of the object. So I based on on the data that we have by now which uh is not just the web telescope data that they mentioned but uh other details. It looks like the object is at least 5 kilometers in diameter and maybe more. And that means that it's at least a thousand times more massive than the previous comet. We know it's it was a comet Borisov discovered in 2019 and and moreover it's about a million times more massive than Amu Mua the first interstellar object. So when you see the third object being a thousand times more massive than the second and a million times more massive than the first it should raise a a big question. How is that possible?
because we should have found a thousand boriss and a million omuam muas before finding one giant icy iceberg of the type that we found.
So, uh this should be really a puzzle and they should have mentioned it as a puzzle but they don't even mention that.
And the second is why do we have it in the plane of the planets? I mean obviously it's a great fortune that all the NASA observatories can look at it and they mentioned the fact that they look at it. They're really happy about the fact that they could monitor it all the time. But the fact that fact that they can monitor it all the time is really a miracle cuz only one in 500 incoming objects would be aligned so well with the ecliptic plane of the planets that allows all these NASA assets to be used.
>> So they don't comment about that. So all the things that appear extremely rare you know like all these features maybe they say something that is not well understood. So NASA, you know, these administrators basically are trying to portray an image of an unusual comet because it came from an in a a different environment. But um they don't attend to the fact that there are extremely rare properties of this comet that should that should puzzle them that. So I think the appropriate response to that would be you know there there are very puzzling facts about this. It it's maybe it's a indeed it's a natural comet but it means that we don't understand the factories that make such things cuz if we get a such a big package that happens to be aligned with the plane of the planets and shows much more nickel than iron you know maybe there is something really fundamentally wrong with the way we think about the origin of these things they don't even bring this up I mean I don't have an issue with them claiming it it must be natural but even if it's natural it seems to me that the main message is that you know we don't fully we are missing something. We don't know how such an object is generated created.
>> If it's not uh again we've we've got a ton of questions for you on on YouTube and I know you're um your time is tight today. Um Adam says if they're billions of years old like you said wouldn't they have discovered a more efficient form of transportation rather than using a comet-like spacecraft? Uh wouldn't they have discovered faster than light travel, teleportation, wormhole, dimensional travel, etc. after billions of years? Uh that's why I'm skeptical on this whole object being of alien origin.
>> Well, this is a strange question because whoever asked this question is skeptical because of ideas that have nothing to do with what we know about physics. We don't know if it's possible to travel faster than light. In fact, Einstein's theory of relativity says it's not. So the question the person who asks the question says why couldn't they discover faster than light travel? Well because as far as we know it doesn't exist.
Okay. And the second is wormholes. As far as we know it doesn't exist. We don't know how to make a wormhole. We don't know if it's possible to make a wormhole because then you would build a time machine that would violate the laws of physics. So as far as we know such things do not exist. So you can't ask a question saying they would have discovered it because we don't know that such things exist. Okay. Now you can ask why wasn't it moving faster than 10 the minus 4 of the speed of light? You know in principle that's a good question. But if they were to move faster, we would never discover an object moving close to the speed of light because the telescopes would not record an object.
They would basically get a a smearing of the light from the object along a a line and it would be very dim. And the observers would dismiss it as an object.
So an object moving too fast, much faster than the typical speed of uh asteroids, comets in our solar system would be discarded. We will not hear about it. The observers will never report about it. So when you ask why don't we see things moving faster is because of a selection effect. Our observations are not tuned to detect such objects.
>> Okay. So uh according to Rizzle he says according to the trajectory it entered our solar system where did three eye atlas come from?
>> We don't know where it came from because that depends on the duration of the journey and we have no no clock on it to tell us how long the journey was. Uh the only thing we have is that it moves at a high speed when it entered the solar system relative to the local population of stars. So the claim is well maybe it came from an old star because old stars are kicked around and they reach higher speeds. But the problem with that proposition and I wrote a paper related to that is that there is a caveat because you could imagine a parent star that is moving slowly and then the ejection speed from that parent star was large.
So we don't know if the ejection speed was large or the original host star was moving fast. And therefore we can't tell the age. There is no way for us to tell the age of the object unless we assume that the object acquired or inherited the original speed of its parent star which is an assumption. We don't know if it's true or not because we don't know what the ejection mechanism was to and where did this object come from within the the vicinity of that star.
>> Isaac asked why do we have virtually no highresolution images of the details in the surface of the moon and Mars? Don't we have the right people to clear that data?
Oh, we do have images of the surface of the moon and Mars, but the when you say not enough resolution, uh that is dictated by the aperture of the cameras that were used. So the there is the Mars or orbiter that is actually gave us detailed images of Mars. There was a lunar orbiter that gave us detailed images of the moon. But we can do much better and in the future hopefully there would be missions that would map those surfaces to much greater details and uh moreover as we go to these places we could map it from up close.
>> Robert says why do the jets and plumes that appear to be coming from three Atlas seem to not be influenced by a 16-hour rotation?
>> That's an excellent question. I ask the same. That's one of my anomalies. you would expect um uh you know given the typical um uh speed of the material in those jets you would expect to see wiggles uh that we don't see and um somehow the the jets are uh tightly cimated. So this is an important puzzle that needs to be addressed again. Um, you know, we we gain new knowledge in science out of asking questions or paying attention to anomalies. We we don't learn much by saying, "Oh, it's a comet. Comets do strange things and therefore we shouldn't worry about it." That's not the way we learn something new.
>> Lots of people bringing up how long it took them to release this data. Um, this one says, "Why would NASA have a big event to release a picture of a simple rock? And with almost 50 days without releasing anything, why should we believe them? They are known to alter their images all the time. Um, bring Smart back. That's what they'd say.
>> Well, uh, I wouldn't necessarily suggest that they modify the images, but uh, you know, NASA is a big bureaucratic organization and a bureaucracy rules. Uh so if there is a government shutdown they may have given instructions not to release any data related to triatlas because they want to they want it to be processed through the headquarters. Uh they didn't uh do the same about other data. For example the high-rise um camera was taking images of Mars and releasing them you know a day later. Um, you can look at the high-rise website and you will see images rel that were released during the the shutdown. No problem at all. However, the three the the image of 3i Atlas was uh waiting for 45 days before we got to see it and it wasn't particularly revealing anything, you know, insightful about the nature of the object. So I I do think that um it's just the the NASA bureaucracy that set some rule about FA atlas. They wanted to have uh the the data publicly available after you know the the administrators have a chance to review it and I don't see anything beyond that. It's just the bureaucracy uh taking hostage the uh dissemination of scientific information. Uh, of course, if it was an academic institution where there is no uh threat from from shutdown and even if there was a a university that was shut down, the scientists would still process it at their home and release the data immediately to the public, you know. So, it's a very different mentality, but but in a government organization, the employees are not allowed to do anything to overrule what the administration tells them. even if uh they can easily process the data.
>> I'm going to try to get to two or three more questions. This one says, "Ai, do you think the 1977 signal could have been from three Atlas as it is reported to have come from the same general direction?"
>> Yeah, that's an excellent question again related to one of the anomalies in my list of 12 on my you can check my um latest essay on medium.com where I discuss all 12. Um so I actually encouraged the radio observers to look at friatas to check if there there is any radio transmission and today there was a report from Mircat the radio observatory uh there and again it's discussed in my essay today and they put an upper limit at a particular range of frequencies radio frequencies uh they observed it on November uh 5th and so the limit is just applicable to that particular date and over some range of frequencies and uh during that time they were able to set an upper limit on the power transmitted that as being less than that of a cell phone. So you can say there was no cell phone on November 5th uh transmitting anything from 3i Atlas.
>> Okay. Um Dr. Lo, if ThreeI Atlas were to change course or if it sent out smaller spacecraft or fragments of itself, how long would it take to arrive to Earth?
Thank you for all that you do.
>> Thank you. So, if it changed course at roughly the same speed, not making it much faster. Um, then it would take a couple of months or so, a few months depending on exactly the details. Uh, and in fact, that was worked out in a paper that I co-authored.
um at in the middle of July that was published by now in a peer-review journal uh along with u Adam Hibbert and Adam Croll we considered the possibility that 3i Atlas is technological spacecraft and asked what kind of a velocity shift does it need to have in order to reach earth at a particular date and you can look at our plots and you will see for any target date there is a different velocity shift that it needs to acquire at an earlier time and and so we give all kinds of scenarios for that.
>> How will we know that the images are authentic and not doctorred?
>> We will never know that uh because we don't have access to the instruments and the flow of data. But we have to trust NASA scientists and you know science is based on trust. As you can tell these days, if you go online, you would see a lot of fake data, misinformation. You can't trust people. But there is a code of honor in science that uh data should never be fabricated by scientists. And um you know there are rare examples where such fake where fake data was was produced and the scientists were punished severely for that. So I would be really surprised if that happened here. Um I trust scientists unless proven differently. Um and so I would just assume this is the data they have especially because it's not very very impressive. Now it's you might say oh well maybe the original data was much more impressive. I would find it really hard to imagine that they would make the im images fuzzier than they actually are.
>> Okay. So what happens now? Now, is your team going to stay up all night and analyze what we just saw?
>> Yeah, I I have some collaborators that would look into the data. I hope we will have access to that data uh and analyze it, see what kind of information we can get from it. But as I said at the beginning, I don't expect big news from that because the quality of the data doesn't look impressive to me. uh it will just be marginal to what we already know and really it's really the coming weeks I think where we will get new insights to to Fear Atlas.
>> Aby we always appreciate you. Thank you so much for um uh staying on with us and taking so many of our viewers questions from YouTube uh and for analyzing all that we just heard whether it was impressive or not.
>> Thanks for having me. I will always tell you what I think and uh with me what you see is what you get. All right, let's leave it there, man. Thank you so much for your time. Appreciate it. Go ahead and bring in Harvard professor Ailob. We have waited to be able to talk to you about this threeey atlas. And finally, we get some images from NASA. So, they say they are um opening a window into other solar systems. What was your reaction to what we just saw and heard?
>> Well, uh there wasn't much news, I must say. Um an hour before that press conference I was asked by a reporter what do I expect and I said I don't expect big news and NASA will repeat the official mantra that Frii Atlas is a natural comet and that they were unable to process the data until now because of the government shutdown and probably the high-rise image will show a fuzzy ball of light like the Hubble image but I hoped to be surprised and I was not.
>> Oh man.
>> Uh >> but we did see a new data uh but nothing major in terms of the insights as to the nature of the object. Um there was data presented in addition to the one we already saw from the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Web Space Telescopes, Ferex Swift. I mean these are things we already witnessed. There was some new data from the Lucy spacecraft, the Maven uh SOHO high-rise.
Um but again all these images were uh fuzzy. Uh there was no new insight offered by them and of course one would like to analyze those images. I mean they detected for example hydrogen from the spectrograph on Maven. Uh so that of course says say says something about the the production rate of water because hydrogen comes from the break up of water molecules and one can also infer that from the detection of uh hydroxil radicals, oxygen and hydrogen molecules that were detected actually um a few weeks ago uh by a radio telescope um mircat and It was detected again today.
There was a report from early November.
So I mean these are details that can be combined to infer production rate of water. We already know that carbon dioxide based on web telescope data was uh much more abundant than than water.
And so um the main questions we have about three atlas were not really addressed.
And the I would say that the data that was released over the past week or two after three Atlas came out of the direction of the sun. So we can observe it from Earth. That data is far more interesting. It shows jets, multiple jets going in different directions. And we're yet to see a big telescope imaging those jets. So far we saw amateur astronomers telescopes. Uh and so these images are intriguing.
uh the question of whether 3i Atlas for example shows non-gravitational acceleration you know that's still being calculated debated uh that's another important insight about what happened to it when it came closest to the sun uh and of course as it gets closest to earth that will be on December 19th we'll have the best opportunity to use the hundreds of telescopes on earth and the Hubble and web space telescopes s to get our best data on it. So, as far as I can tell, in terms of scientific output, there wasn't much uh offered >> in this press conference.
>> Plenty of questions for you. Uh, one question that was just posed. Uh, can you respond to their conversation about or their comments about it putting off nickel?
>> Well, uh, so indeed that's one of the anomalies. I listed 12 anomalies about 3i Atlas. One of them is that you know the the detection of nickel was not supplemented by significant detection of iron and in fact the first detection of nickel had no iron just an upper limit.
Uh very extreme ratio of nickel to iron that was never seen before in any comet.
Uh and obviously that's puzzling because nickel and iron are produced in exploding stars in similar amounts. And in fact for the solar composition there is more iron than nickel. So um we've never seen something like that. And you know when we uh for example find nickel from the impact of asteroids that are nickel rich they are also iron rich that there is never a situation where it's mostly nickel and very little iron except for industrial production of of alloys nickel alloys that are used for aerospace applications. So I mean they are always seeing whatever data we get as a a signature of an unusual comet.
Okay. So no matter how unusual the chemical composition would be, they would say well it came from a different environment. What do you expect? Uh the main you know the main anomaly that I find extremely puzzling and they didn't even mention it is the size of the object. So I based on on the data that we have by now which uh is not just the web telescope data that they mentioned but uh other details. It looks like the object is at least 5 kilometers in diameter and maybe more and that means that it's at least a thousand times more massive than the previous comet. We know it's it was a comet Borisov discovered in 2019 and and moreover it's about a million times more massive than Amu Mua the first interstellar object. So when you see the third object being a thousand times more massive than the second and a million times more massive than the first it should raise a a big question. How is that possible?
because we should have found a thousand borissovs and a million omu muas before finding one giant icy iceberg of the type that we found.
So, uh this should be really a puzzle and they should have mentioned it as a puzzle but they don't even mention that.
And the second is why do we have it in the plane of the planets? I mean obviously it's a great fortune that all the NASA observatories can look at it and they mention the fact that they look at it. They're really happy about the fact that they could monitor it all the time. But the fact that fact that they can monitor it all the time is really a miracle cuz only one in 500 incoming objects would be aligned so well with the ecliptic plane of the planets that allows all these NASA assets to be used.
>> So they don't comment about that. So all the things that appear extremely rare you know like all these features maybe they say something that is not well understood. So NASA, you know, these administrators basically are trying to portray an image of an unusual comet because it came from in a a different environment. But um they don't attend to the fact that there are extremely rare properties of this comet that should that should puzzle them that. So I think the appropriate response to that would be you know there there are very puzzling facts about this. It it's maybe it's a indeed it's a natural comet but it means that we don't understand the factories that make such things cuz if we get a such a big package that happens to be aligned with the plane of the planets and shows much more nickel than iron you know maybe there is something really fundamentally wrong with the way we think about the origin of these things they don't even bring this up I mean I don't have an issue with them claiming it it must be natural but even if it's natural it seems to me that the main message is that you know we don't fully we are missing something. We don't know how such an object is generated created.
>> If it's not uh again we've we've got a ton of questions for you on on YouTube and I know you're um your time is tight today. Um Adam says if they're billions of years old like you said, wouldn't they have discovered a more efficient form of transportation rather than using a comet-like spacecraft? Uh wouldn't they have discovered faster than light travel, teleportation, wormhole dimensional travel, etc. after billions of years? Uh that's why I'm skeptical on this whole object being of alien origin.
>> Well, this is a strange question because whoever asked this question is skeptical because of ideas that have nothing to do with what we know about physics. We don't know if it's possible to travel fast and light. In fact, Einstein's theory of relativity says it's not. So the question the person who asked the question says why couldn't they discover faster than light travel? Well because as far as we know it doesn't exist.
Okay. And the second is wormholes. As far as we know it doesn't exist. We don't know how to make a wormhole. We don't know if it's possible to make a wormhole because then you would build a time machine that would violate the laws of physics. So as far as we know such things do not exist. So you can't ask a question saying they would have discovered it because we don't know that such things exist. Okay. Now you can ask why wasn't it moving faster than 10 the minus 4 of the speed of light? You know in principle that's a good question. But if they were to move faster, we would never discover an object moving close to the speed of light because the telescopes would not record an object.
They would basically get a a smearing of the light from the object along a a line and it would be very dim. And the observers would dismiss it as an object.
So an object moving too fast, much faster than the typical speed of uh asteroids, comets in our solar system would be discarded. We will not hear about it. The observers will never report about it. So when you ask why don't we see things moving faster is because of a selection effect. Our observations are not tuned to detect such objects.
>> Okay. So uh according to Rizzle he says according to the trajectory it entered our solar system where did three eye atlas come from?
>> We don't know where it came from because that depends on the duration of the journey and we have no no clock on it to tell us how long the journey was. Uh the only thing we have is that it moves at a high speed when it entered the solar system relative to the local population of stars. So the claim is well maybe it came from an old star because old stars are kicked around and they reach higher speeds. But the problem with that proposition and I wrote a paper related to that is that there is a caveat because you could imagine a parent star that is moving slowly and then the ejection speed from that parent star was large.
So, we don't know if the ejection speed was large or the original host star was moving fast. And therefore, we can't tell the age. There is no way for us to tell the age of the object unless we assume that the object acquired or inherited the original speed of its parent star, which is an assumption. We don't know if it's true or not because we don't know what the ejection mechanism was to and where did this object come from within the the vicinity of that star.
>> Isaac asked why do we have virtually no highresolution images of the details in the surface of the moon and Mars? Don't we have the right people to clear that data?
Oh, we do have images of the surface of the moon and Mars, but the when you say not enough resolution, uh that is dictated by the aperture of the cameras that were used. So the there is the Mars or orbiter that is actually gave us detailed images of Mars. There was a lunar orbiter that gave us detailed images of the moon. that we can do much better and in the future hopefully there would be missions that would map those surfaces to much greater details and uh moreover as we go to these places we could map it from up close.
>> Robert says why do the jets and plumes that appear to be coming from three Atlas seem to not be influenced by a 16-hour rotation?
>> That's an excellent question. I asked the same. That's one of my anomalies.
you would expect um uh you know given the typical um uh speed of the material in those jets you would expect to see wiggles uh that we don't see and um somehow the the jets are uh tightly cimated. So this is an important puzzle that needs to be addressed again. Um, you know, we we gain new knowledge in science out of asking questions or paying attention to anomalies. We we don't learn much by saying, "Oh, it's a comet. Comets do strange things and therefore we shouldn't worry about it."
That's not the way we learn something new.
>> Lots of people bringing up how long it took them to release this data. Um, uh, this one says, "Why would NASA have a big event to release a picture of a simple rock? And with almost 50 days without releasing anything, why should we believe them? They are known to alter their images all the time. Um, bring smart back. That's what they said.
>> Well, uh, I wouldn't necessarily suggest that they modify the images, but uh, you know, NASA is a big bureaucratic organization and bureaucracy rules. Uh so if there is a government shutdown they may have given instructions not to release any data related to triatlas because they want to they want it to be processed through the headquarters. Uh they didn't uh do the same about other data. For example the high-rise um camera was taking images of Mars and releasing them you know a day later. Um, you can look at the high-rise website and you will see images rel that were released during the the shutdown. No problem at all. However, the three the the image of 3i Atlas was uh waiting for 45 days before we got to see it and it wasn't particularly revealing anything, you know, insightful about the nature of the object. So I I do think that um it's just the the NASA bureaucracy that set some rule about Fatlas. They wanted to have uh the the data publicly available after you know the the administrators have a chance to review it and I don't see anything beyond that. It's just the bureaucracy uh taking hostage the uh dissemination of scientific information. Uh, of course, if it was a an academic institution where there is no uh threat from from shutdown and even if there was a a university that was shut down, the scientists would still process it at their home and release the data immediately to the public, you know. So, it's a very different mentality, but but in a government organization, the employees are not allowed to do anything to overrule what the administration tells them. even if uh they can easily process the data.
>> I'm going to try to get to two or three more questions. This one says, "Avi, do you think the 1977 signal could have been from three Atlas as it is reported to have come from the same general direction?"
>> Yeah, that's an excellent question again related to one of the anomalies in my list of 12 on my you can check my um latest essay on medium.com where I discuss all 12. Um so I actually encouraged the radio observers to look at friatas to check if there there is any radio transmission and today there was a report from Mircat the radio observatory uh there and again it's discussed in my essay today and they put an upper limit at a particular range of frequencies radio frequencies uh they observed it on November uh 5th and so the limit is just applicable to that particular date and over some range of frequencies and uh during that time they were able to set an upper limit on the power transmitted as being less than that of a cell phone.
So you can say that there was no cell phone on November 5th uh transmitting anything from 3i Atlas.
>> Okay. Um Dr. globe. If ThreeI Atlas were to change course or if it sent out smaller spacecraft or fragments of itself, how long would it take to arrive to Earth? Thank you for all that you do.
>> Thank you. So, if it changed course at roughly the same speed, not making it much faster. Um, then it would take a couple of months or so, a few months depending on exactly the details. Uh, and in fact, that was worked out in a paper that I co-authored.
um at in the middle of July that was published by now in a peer-review journal uh along with uh Adam Hibbert and Adam Croll we considered the possibility that 3II Atlas is technological spacecraft and asked what kind of a velocity shift does it need to have in order to reach Earth at a particular date and you can look at our plots and you will see for any target date there is a different velocity shift that it needs to acquire at an earlier time and and so we give all kinds of scenarios for that.
>> How will we know that the images are authentic and not doctorred?
>> We will never know that uh because we don't have access to the instruments and the flow of data. But we have to trust NASA scientists and you know science is based on trust. As you can tell these days, if you go online, you would see a lot of fake data, misinformation. You can't trust people. But there is a code of honor in science that uh data should never be fabricated by scientists. And um you know there are rare examples where such fake where fake data was was produced and the scientists were punished severely for that. So I would be really surprised if that happened here. Um I trust scientists unless proven differently. Um and so I would just assume this is the data they have especially because it's not very very impressive. Now it's you might say oh well maybe the original data was much more impressive. I would find it really hard to imagine that they would make the im images fuzzier than they actually are.
>> Okay. So what happens now? Now, is your team going to stay up all night and analyze what we just saw?
>> Yeah, I I have some collaborators that would look into the data. I hope we will have access to that data uh and analyze it, see what kind of information we can get from it. But as I said at the beginning, I don't expect big news from that because the quality of the data doesn't look impressive to me. uh it will just be marginal to what we already know and really it's really the coming weeks I think where we will get new insights to to free atlas.
>> Avi we always appreciate you. Thank you so much for um uh staying on with us and taking so many of our viewers questions from YouTube uh and for analyzing all that we just heard whether it was impressive or not.
>> Thanks for having me. I will always tell you what I think and uh with me what you see is what you get. All right, let's leave it there, man. Thank you so much for your time. Appreciate it. Go ahead and bring in Harvard professor Avi. We have waited to be able to talk to you about this threeey atlas. And finally, we get some images from NASA. So, they say they are um opening a window into other solar systems. What was your reaction to what we just saw and heard?
>> Well, uh there wasn't much news, I must say. Um an hour before that press conference I was asked by a reporter what do I expect and I said I don't expect big news and NASA will repeat the official mantra that Frii Atlas is a natural comet and that they were unable to process the data until now because of the government shutdown and probably the high-rise image will show a fuzzy ball of light like the Hubble image but I hoped to be surprised and I was not.
>> Oh man.
>> Uh but we did see a new data uh but nothing major in terms of the insights as to the nature of the object. Um there was data presented in addition to the one we already saw from the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Web Space Telescopes, Ferex Swift. I mean these are things we already witnessed. There was some new data from the Lucy spacecraft, the Maven uh SOHO high-rise.
Um but again all these images were uh fuzzy. Uh there was no new insight offered by them and of course one would like to analyze those images. I mean they detected for example hydrogen from the spectrograph on Maven. Uh so that of course says say says something about the the production rate of water because hydrogen comes from the breakup of water molecules and one can also infer that from the detection of uh hydroxil radicals, oxygen and hydrogen molecules that were detected actually um a few weeks ago uh by a radio telescope um mircat and It was detected again today.
There was a report from early November.
So I mean these are details that can be combined to infer production rate of water. We already know that carbon dioxide based on web telescope data was uh much more abundant than than water.
And so um the main questions we have about reatlas were not really addressed. And the I would say that the data that was released over the past week or two after three Atlas came out of the direction of the sun. So we can observe it from Earth. That data is far more interesting. It shows jets, multiple jets going in different directions. And we're yet to see a big telescope imaging those jets. So far we saw amateur astronomers telescopes. Uh and so these images are intriguing.
The question of whether three Atlas for example shows non-gravitational acceleration, you know, that's still being calculated, debated. Uh that's another important insight about what happened to it when it came closest to the sun. uh and of course as it gets closest to Earth that will be on December 19th we'll have the best opportunity to use the hundreds of telescopes on Earth and the Hubble and web space telescopes to get our best data on it. So as far as I can tell in terms of scientific output there wasn't much uh offered >> in this press conference.
>> Plenty of questions for you. Uh, one question that was just posed. Uh, can you respond to their conversation about or their comments about it putting off nickel?
>> Well, uh, so indeed that's one of the anomalies. I listed 12 anomalies about 3 atlas. One of them is that you know the the detection of nickel was not supplemented by significant detection of iron. And in fact, the first detection of nickel had no iron, just an upper limit. uh very extreme ratio of nickel to iron that was never seen before in any comet. Uh and obviously that's puzzling because nickel and iron are produced in exploding stars in similar amounts. And in fact for the solar composition there is more iron than nickel. So um we've never seen something like that. And you know when we uh for example find nickel from the impact of asteroids that are nickel rich they are also iron rich that that there is never a situation where it's mostly nickel and very little iron except for industrial production of of alloys nickel alloys that are used for aerospace applications. So I mean they are always seeing whatever data we get as a a signature of an unusual comet. Okay. So no matter how unusual the chemical composition would be, they would say, well, it came from a different environment. What do you expect? Uh the main, you know, the main anomaly that I find extremely puzzling and they didn't even mention it is the size of the object. So I based on on the data that we have by now which uh is not just the web telescope data that they mentioned but other details. It looks like the object is at least 5 kilometers in diameter and maybe more. And that means that it's at least a thousand times more massive than the previous comet. We know it's it was a comet Borisov discovered in 2019 and and moreover it's about a million times more massive than Amu Mua the first interstellar object. So when you see the third object being a thousand times more massive than the second and a million times more massive than the first it should raise a a big question. How is that possible?
because we should have found a thousand borisovs and a million omu muas before finding one giant icy iceberg of the type that we found.
So, uh this should be really a puzzle and they should have mentioned it as a puzzle but they don't even mention that.
And the second is why do we have it in the plane of the planets? I mean obviously it's a great fortune that all the NASA observatories can look at it and they mention the fact that they look at it. They're really happy about the fact that they could monitor it all the time. But the fact that fact that they can monitor it all the time is really a miracle cuz only one in 500 incoming objects would be aligned so well with the ecliptic plane of the planets that allows all these NASA assets to be used.
>> So they don't comment about that. So all the things that appear extremely rare you know like all these features maybe they say something that is not well understood. So NASA, you know, these administrators basically are trying to portray an image of an unusual comet because it came from in a a different environment, but um they don't attend to the fact that there are extremely rare properties of this comet that should that should puzzle them that. So I think the appropriate response to that would be, you know, there there are very puzzling facts about this. It it's maybe it's a indeed it's a natural comet but it means that we don't understand the factories that make such things because if we get a such a big package that happens to be aligned with the plane of the planets and shows much more nickel than iron you know maybe there is something really fundamentally wrong with the way we think about the origin of this thing they don't even bring this up I mean I don't have an issue with them claiming it it must be natural but even if it's natural it seems to me that the main message is that you know we don't fully we are missing something. We don't know how such an object is generated created.
>> If it's not uh again we've we've got a ton of questions for you on on YouTube and I know you're um your time is tight today. Um Adam says if they're billions of years old like you said, wouldn't they have discovered a more efficient form of transportation rather than using a comet-like spacecraft? Uh wouldn't they have discovered faster than light travel, teleportation, wormhole, dimensional travel, etc. after billions of years? Uh that's why I'm skeptical on this whole object being of alien origin.
>> Well, this is a strange question because whoever asked this question is skeptical because of ideas that have nothing to do with what we know about physics. We don't know if it's possible to travel fast and light. In fact, Einstein's theory of relativity says it's not. So the question the person who asks the question says why couldn't they discover faster than light travel? Well because as far as we know it doesn't exist.
Okay. And the second is wormholes. As far as we know it doesn't exist. We don't know how to make a wormhole. We don't know if it's possible to make a wormhole because then you would build a time machine that would violate the laws of physics. So as far as we know such things do not exist. So you can't ask a question saying they would have discovered it because we don't know that such things exist. Okay. Now you can ask why wasn't it moving faster than 10 the minus 4 of the speed of light? You know in principle that's a good question. But if they were to move faster, we would never discover an object moving close to the speed of light because the telescopes would not record an object.
They would basically get a a smearing of the light from the object along a a line and it would be very dim. And the observers would dismiss it as an object.
So an object moving too fast, much faster than the typical speed of uh asteroids, comets in our solar system would be discarded. We will not hear about it. The observers will never report about it. So when you ask why don't we see things moving faster is because of a selection effect. Our observations are not tuned to detect such objects.
>> Okay. So uh according to Rizzle he says according to the trajectory it entered our solar system where did three eye atlas come from?
>> We don't know where it came from because that depends on the duration of the journey and we have no no clock on it to tell us how long the journey was. Uh the only thing we have is that it moves at a high speed when it entered the solar system relative to the local population of stars. So the claim is well maybe it came from an old star because old stars are kicked around and they reach higher speeds. But the problem with that proposition and I wrote a paper related to that is that there is a caveat because you could imagine a parent star that is moving slowly and then the ejection speed from that parent star was large.
So, we don't know if the ejection speed was large or the original host star was moving fast. And therefore, we can't tell the age. There is no way for us to tell the age of the object unless we assume that the object acquired or inherited the original speed of its parent star, which is an assumption. We don't know if it's true or not because we don't know what the ejection mechanism was to and where did this object come from within the the vicinity of that star.
>> Isaac asked why do we have virtually no highresolution images of the details in the surface of the moon and Mars? Don't we have the right people to clear that data?
Oh, we do have images of the surface of the moon and Mars, but the when you say not enough resolution, uh that is dictated by the aperture of the cameras that were used. So the there is the Mars or orbiter that is actually gave us detailed images of Mars. There was a lunar orbiter that gave us detailed images of the moon. that we can do much better and in the future hopefully there would be missions that would map those surfaces to much greater details and uh moreover as we go to these places we could map it from up close.
>> Robert says why do the jets and plumes that appear to be coming from three Atlas seem to not be influenced by a 16-hour rotation?
>> That's an excellent question. I asked the same. That's one of my anomalies.
you would expect um uh you know given the typical um speed of the material in those jets you would expect to see wiggles uh that we don't see and um somehow the the jets are uh tightly cimated. So this is an important puzzle that needs to be addressed again. Um, you know, we we gain new knowledge in science out of asking questions or paying attention to anomalies. We we don't learn much by saying, "Oh, it's a comet. Comets do strange things and therefore we shouldn't worry about it."
That's not the way we learn something new.
>> Lots of people bringing up how long it took them to release this data. Um, this one says, "Why would NASA have a big event to release a picture of a simple rock? And with almost 50 days without releasing anything, why should we believe them? They are known to alter their images all the time. Um, bring smart back. That's what they'd say.
>> Well, uh, I wouldn't necessarily suggest that they modify the images, but uh, you know, NASA is a big bureaucratic organization and a bureaucracy rules. Uh so if there is a government shutdown they may have given instructions not to release any data related to triatlas because they want to they want it to be processed through the headquarters. Uh they didn't uh do the same about other data. For example the high-rise um camera was taking images of Mars and releasing them you know a day later. Um, you can look at the high-rise website and you will see images rel that were released during the the shutdown. No problem at all. However, the three the the image of 3i Atlas was uh waiting for 45 days before we got to see it and it wasn't particularly revealing anything you know insightful about the nature of the object. So I I do think that um it's just the the NASA bureaucracy that set some rule about Fatlas. They wanted to have uh the the data publicly available after you know the the administrators have a chance to review it and I don't see anything beyond that. It's just the bureaucracy uh taking hostage the uh dissemination of scientific information. Uh, of course, if it was a an academic institution where there is no uh threat from from shutdown and even if there was a a university that was shut down, the scientists would still process it at their home and release the data immediately to the public, you know. So, it's a very different mentality. But, but in a government organization, the employees are not allowed to do anything to overrule what the administration tells them. even if uh they can easily process the data.
>> I'm going to try to get to two or three more questions. This one says, "Avi, do you think the 1977 signal could have been from three Atlas as it is reported to have come from the same general direction?"
>> Yeah, that's an excellent question again related to one of the anomalies in my list of 12 on my you can check my um latest essay on medium.com where I discuss all 12. Um so I actually encouraged the radio observers to look at triatas to check if there there is any radio transmission and today there was a report from Mircat the radio observatory uh there and again it's discussed in my essay today and they put an upper limit at a particular range of frequencies radio frequencies uh they observed it on November uh 5th and so the limit is just applicable to that particular date and over some range of frequencies and uh during that time they were able to set an upper limit on the power transmitted as being less than that of a cell phone.
So you can say that there was no cell phone on November 5th uh transmitting anything from 3i Atlas.
>> Okay. Um Dr. lobe. If ThreeI Atlas were to change course or if it sent out smaller spacecraft or fragments of itself, how long would it take to arrive to Earth? Thank you for all that you do.
>> Thank you. So, if it changed course at roughly the same speed, not making it much faster. Um, then it would take a couple of months or so, a few months depending on exactly the details. Uh, and in fact, that was worked out in a paper that I co-authored.
um at in the middle of July that was published by now in a peer-review journal uh along with Adam Hibbert and Adam Croll we considered the possibility that 3i Atlas is technological spacecraft and asked what kind of a velocity shift does it need to have in order to reach earth at a particular date and you can look at our plots and you will see for any target date there is a different velocity shift that it needs to acquire at an earlier time and and so we give all kinds of scenarios for that.
>> How will we know that the images are authentic and not doctorred?
>> We will never know that uh because we don't have access to the instruments and the flow of data. But we have to trust NASA scientists and you know science is based on trust. As you can tell these days, if you go online, you would see a lot of fake data, misinformation. You can't trust people. But there is a code of honor in science that uh data should never be fabricated by scientists. And um you know there are rare examples where such fake where fake data was was produced and the scientists were punished severely for that. So I would be really surprised if that happened here. Um I trust scientists unless proven differently. Um and so I would just assume this is the data they have especially because it's not very very impressive. Now it's you might say oh well maybe the original data was much more impressive. I would find it really hard to imagine that they would make the im images fuzzier than they actually are.
>> Okay. So what happens now? Now, is your team going to stay up all night and analyze what we just saw?
>> Yeah, I I have some collaborators that would look into the data. I hope we will have access to that data uh and analyze it, see what kind of information we can get from it. But as I said at the beginning, I don't expect big news from that because the quality of the data doesn't look impressive to me. uh it will just be marginal to what we already know and really it's really the coming weeks I think where we will get new insights to to free Atlas.
>> AI we always appreciate you. Thank you so much for um uh staying on with us and taking so many of our viewers questions from YouTube uh and for analyzing all that we just heard whether it was impressive or not.
>> Thanks for having me. I will always tell you what I think and uh with me what you see is what you get. All right, let's leave it there, man. Thank you so much for your time. Appreciate it. Go ahead and bring in Harvard professor Avi Lobo.
We have waited to be able to talk to you about this threeey atlas. And finally, we get some images from NASA. So, they say they are um opening a window into other solar systems. What was your reaction to what we just saw and heard?
>> Well, uh there wasn't much news, I must say. Um an hour before that press conference I was asked by a reporter what do I expect and I said I don't expect big news and NASA will repeat the official mantra that FIA Atlas is a natural comet and that they were unable to process the data until now because of the government shutdown and probably the high-rise image will show a fuzzy ball of light like the Hubble image but I hoped to be surprised and I was not.
>> Oh man.
>> Uh >> but we did see a new data uh but nothing major in terms of the insights as to the nature of the object. Um there was data presented in addition to the one we already saw from the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Web Space Telescopes, Ferex Swift. I mean these are things we already witnessed. There was some new data from the Lucy spacecraft, Maven uh SOHO high-rise. Um but again all these images were uh fuzzy. Uh there was no new insight offered by them and of course one would like to analyze those images. I mean they detected for example hydrogen from the spectrograph on Maven. Uh so that of course says say says something about the the production rate of water because hydrogen comes from the breakup of water molecules and one can also infer that from the detection of uh hydroxil radicals, oxygen and hydrogen molecules that were detected actually um a few weeks ago uh by a radio telescope um mircat and It was detected again today.
There was a report from early November.
So I mean these are details that can be combined to infer production rate of water. We already know that carbon dioxide based on web telescope data was uh much more abundant than than water.
And so um the main questions we have about three atlas were not really addressed.
And the I would say that the data that was released over the past week or two after three Atlas came out of the direction of the sun. So we can observe it from Earth. That data is far more interesting. It shows jets, multiple jets going in different directions. And we're yet to see a big telescope imaging those jets. So far we saw amateur astronomers telescopes. Uh and so these images are intriguing.
The question of whether three atlas for example shows non-gravitational acceleration you know that's still being calculated debated that's another important insight about what happened to it when it came closest to the sun uh and of course as it gets closest to earth that will be on December 19th we'll have the best opportunity to use the hundreds of telescopes on earth and the Hubble and web space telescopes to get our best data on it. So, as far as I can tell, in terms of scientific output, there wasn't much uh offered in this press conference.
>> Plenty of questions for you. Uh, one question that was just posed. Uh, can you respond to their conversation about or their comments about it putting off nickel?
>> Well, uh, so indeed that's one of the anomalies. I listed 12 anomalies about 3i Atlas. One of them is that you know the the detection of nickel was not supplemented by significant detection of iron and in fact the first detection of nickel had no iron just an upper limit.
Uh very extreme ratio of nickel to iron that was never seen before in any comet.
Uh and obviously that's puzzling because nickel and iron are produced in exploding stars in similar amounts. And in fact for the solar composition there is more iron than nickel. So um we've never seen something like that. And you know when we uh for example find nickel from the impact of asteroids that are nickel rich they are also iron rich that there is never a situation where it's mostly nickel and very little iron except for industrial production of of alloys nickel alloys that are used for aerospace applications. So I mean they are always seeing um whatever data we get as a a signature of an unusual comet. Okay. So no matter how unusual the chemical composition would be they would say well it came from a different environment. What do you expect? Uh the main you know the main anomaly that I find the extremely puzzling and they didn't even mention it is the size of the object. So I based on on the data that we have by now which uh is not just the web telescope data that they mentioned but other details. It looks like the object is at least 5 kilometers in diameter and maybe more. And that means that it's at least a thousand times more massive than the previous comet. We know it's it was a comet Borisov discovered in 2019 and and moreover it's about a million times more massive than Amu Mua the first interstellar object. So when you see the third object being a thousand times more massive than the second and a million times more massive than the first it should raise a a big question. How is that possible?
because we should have found a thousand borisovs and a million omu muas before finding one giant icy iceberg of the type that we found.
So, uh this should be really a puzzle and they should have mentioned it as a puzzle but they don't even mention that.
And the second is why do we have it in the plane of the planets? I mean obviously it's a great fortune that all the NASA observatories can look at it and they mention the fact that they look at it they're really happy about the fact that they could monitor it all the time but the fact that fact that they can monitor it all the time is really a miracle cuz only one in 500 incoming objects would be aligned so well with the ecliptic plane of the planets that allows all these NASA assets to be used.
>> So they don't comment about that. So all the things that appear extremely rare you know like all these features maybe they say something that is not well understood. So NASA, you know, these administrators basically are trying to portray an image of an unusual comet because it came from in a a different environment, but um they don't attend to the fact that there are extremely rare properties of this comet that should that should puzzle them that. So I think the appropriate response to that would be, you know, there there are very puzzling facts about this. It it's maybe it's a indeed it's a natural comet but it means that we don't understand the factories that make such things because if we get a such a big package that happens to be aligned with the plane of the planets and shows much more nickel than iron you know maybe there is something really fundamentally wrong with the way we think about the origin of this thing they don't even bring this up I mean I don't have an issue with them claiming it it must be natural but even if it's natural it seems to me that the main message is that you know we don't fully we are missing something we don't know how such an object is generated created >> if it's not uh again we've we've got a ton of questions for you on on YouTube and I know you're um your time is tight today um Adam says if they're billions of years old like you said wouldn't they have discovered a more efficient form of transportation rather than using a comet-like spacecraft wouldn't they have discovered faster than light travelation wormhole, dimensional travel, etc. after billions of years. That's why I'm skeptical on this whole object being of alien origin.
Well, this is a strange question because whoever asked this question is skeptical because of ideas that have nothing to do with what we know about physics. We don't know if it's possible to travel fast and light. In fact, Einstein's theory of relativity says it's not. So the question the person who asks the question says why couldn't they discover faster than light travel? Well because as far as we know it doesn't exist.
Okay. And the second is wormholes. As far as we know it doesn't exist. We don't know how to make a wormhole. We don't know if it's possible to make a wormhole because then you would build a time machine that would violate the laws of physics. So as far as we know such things do not exist. So you can't ask a question saying they would have discovered it because we don't know that such things exist. Okay. Now you can ask why wasn't it moving faster than 10 the minus 4 of the speed of light? You know in principle that's a good question. But if they were to move faster, we would never discover an object moving close to the speed of light because the telescopes would not record an object.
They would basically get a a smearing of the light from the object along a a line and it would be very dim. And the observers would dismiss it as an object.
So an object moving too fast, much faster than the typical speed of uh asteroids, comets in our solar system would be discarded. We will not hear about it. The observers will never report about it. So when you ask why don't we see things moving faster is because of a selection effect. Our observations are not tuned to detect such objects.
>> Okay. So uh according to Rizzle he says according to the trajectory it entered our solar system where did three eye atlas come from?
>> We don't know where it came from because that depends on the duration of the journey and we have no no clock on it to tell us how long the journey was. Uh the only thing we have is that it moves at a high speed when it entered the solar system relative to the local population of stars. So the claim is well maybe it came from an old star because old stars are kicked around and they reach higher speeds. But the problem with that proposition and I wrote a paper related to that is that there is a caveat because you could imagine a parent star that is moving slowly and then the ejection speed from that parent star was large.
So, we don't know if the ejection speed was large or the original host star was moving fast. And therefore, we can't tell the age. There is no way for us to tell the age of the object unless we assume that the object acquired or inherited the original speed of its parent star, which is an assumption. We don't know if it's true or not because we don't know what the ejection mechanism was to and where did this object come from within the the vicinity of that star.
>> Isaac asked why do we have virtually no highresolution images of the details in the surface of the moon and Mars? Don't we have the right people to clear that data?
>> Oh, we do have images of the surface of the moon and Mars. But the when you say not enough resolution uh that is dictated by the aperture of the cameras that were used. So the there is the Mars uh or orbiter that is actually gave us detailed images of Mars. There was a lunar orbiter that gave us detailed images of the moon. But we can do much better and in the future hopefully there would be missions that would map those surfaces to much greater details. And moreover, as we go to the these places, we could map it from up close.
>> Robert says, "Why do the jets and plumes that appear to be coming from three Atlas seem to not be influenced by a 16-hour rotation?"
>> That's an excellent question. I asked the same. That's one of my anomalies.
you would expect um erh you know given the typical um speed of the material in those jets you would expect to see wiggles uh that we don't see and somehow the the jets are uh tightly cimated. So this is an important puzzle that needs to be addressed. Again, um you know, we we gain new knowledge in science out of asking questions or paying attention to anomalies. We we don't learn much by saying, "Oh, it's a comet. Comets do strange things and therefore we shouldn't worry about it." That's not the way we learn something new.
>> Lots of people bringing up how long it took them to release this data. Um uh this one says, "Why would NASA have a big event to release a picture of a simple rock? And with almost 50 days without releasing anything, why should we believe them? They are known to alter their images all the time. Um bring smart back." That's what they'd say. Well, uh I wouldn't necessarily suggest that they modify the images, but uh you know NASA is a big bureaucratic organization and a bureaucracy rules. Uh so if there is a government shutdown, they may have given instructions not to release any data related to triatlas because they want to they want it to be processed through the headquarters.
uh they didn't uh do the same about other data. For example, the high-rise um camera was taking images of Mars and releasing them, you know, a day later.
Um you can look at the high-rise website and you will see images rel that were released during the the shutdown. No problem at all. However, the three the the image of three Atlas was uh waiting for 45 days before we got to see it and it wasn't particularly revealing anything you know insightful about the nature of the object. So I I do think that um it's just the the NASA bureaucracy that set some rule about Fatlas. they wanted to have uh the the data publicly available after you know the the administrators have a chance to review it and I don't see anything beyond that it's just the bureaucracy uh taking hostage the uh dissemination of scientific information uh of course if it was an academic institution where there is no uh threat from from shutdown and even if there was a a university that was shut down. The the scientists would still process it at their home and release the data immediately to the public, you know. So, it's a very different mentality, but but in a government organization, the employees are not allowed to do anything to overrule what the administration tells them, even if uh they can easily process the data.
>> I'm going to try to get to two or three more questions. This one says, "Avi, do you think the 1977 signal could have been from three Atlas as it is reported to have come from the same general direction?"
>> Yeah, that's an excellent question again related to one of the anomalies in my list of 12 on my you can check my um latest essay on medium.com where I discuss all 12. Um so I actually encouraged the radio observers to look at friatas to check if there there is any radio transmission and today there was a report from Mircat the radio observatory uh there and again it's discussed in my essay today and they put an upper limit at a particular range of frequencies radio frequencies uh they observed it on November uh 5th and so the limit is just applicable to that particular date and over some range of frequencies and uh during that time they were able to set an upper limit on the power transmitted as being less than that of a cell phone.
So you can say that there was no cell phone on November 5th uh transmitting anything from 3i Atlas.
>> Okay. Um Dr. lobe. If ThreeI Atlas were to change course or if it sent out smaller spacecraft or fragments of itself, how long would it take to arrive to Earth? Thank you for all that you do.
Thank you. So, if it changed course at roughly the same speed, not making it much faster. Um, then it would take a couple of months or so, a few months depending on exactly the details. Uh, and in fact, that was worked out in a paper that I co-authored.
um at in the middle of July that was published by now in a peer-review journal uh along with u Adam Hibbert and Adam Croll we considered the possibility that 3 atlas is technological spacecraft and asked what kind of a velocity shift does it need to have in order to reach earth at a particular date and you can look at our plots and you will see for any target date there is a different velocity shift that it needs to acquire at an earlier time and and so we give all kinds of scenarios for that.
>> How will we know that the images are authentic and not doctorred?
>> We will never know that uh because we don't have access to the instruments and the flow of data. But we have to trust NASA scientists and you know science is based on trust. As you can tell these days, if you go online, you would see a lot of fake data, misinformation. You can't trust people. But there is a code of honor in science that uh data should never be fabricated by scientists. And um you know there are rare examples where such fake where fake data was was produced and the scientists were punished severely for that. So I would be really surprised if that happened here. Um I trust scientists unless proven differently. Um and so I would just assume this is the data they have especially because it's not very very impressive. Now it's you might say oh well maybe the original data was much more impressive. I would find it really hard to imagine that they would make the im images fuzzier than they actually are.
>> Okay. So what happens now? Now, is your team going to stay up all night and analyze what we just saw?
>> Yeah, I I have some collaborators that would look into the data. I hope we will have access to that data uh and analyze it, see what kind of information we can get from it. But as I said at the beginning, I don't expect big news from that because the quality of the data doesn't look impressive to me. uh it will just be marginal to what we already know and really it's really the coming weeks I think where we will get new insights to to free Atlas.
>> AI we always appreciate you. Thank you so much for um uh staying on with us and taking so many of our viewers questions from YouTube uh and for analyzing all that we just heard whether it was impressive or not.
>> Thanks for having me. I will always tell you what I think and uh with me what you see is what you get.
>> All right, let's leave it there, man.
Thank you so much for your time.
Appreciate it. Go ahead and bring in Harvard professor Avi Lobo. We have waited to be able to talk to you about this threeey atlas. And finally, we get some images from NASA. So, they say they are um opening a window into other solar systems. What was your reaction to what we just saw and heard?
Well, uh, there wasn't much news, I must say. Um, an hour before that press conference, I was asked by a reporter, what do I expect? And I said, I don't expect big news and NASA will repeat the official mantra that Frii Atlas is a natural comet and that they were unable to process the data until now because of the government shutdown. And probably the high-rise image will show a fuzzy ball of light like the Hubble image.
But uh I hoped to be surprised and I was not.
>> Oh man.
>> But we did see a new data uh but nothing major in terms of the insights as to the nature of the object. Um there was data presented in addition to the one we already saw from the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Web Space Telescopes, Ferex, Swift test. I mean these are things we already witnessed.
There was some new data from the Lucy spacecraft, Maven uh SOHO high-rise. Um but again all these uh images were uh fuzzy. Uh there was no new insight offered by them and of course one would like to analyze those images. I mean they detected for example hydrogen from the spectrograph on maven. Uh so that of course says say says something about the the production rate of water because hydrogen comes from the breakup of water molecules and one can also infer that from the detection of uh hydroxil radicals, oxygen and hydrogen molecules that were detected actually um a few weeks ago uh by a radio telescope um mircat and it was detected again today.
There was a report from uh early November. So I mean these are details that can be combined to infer production rate of water. We already know that carbon dioxide based on web telescope data was uh much more abundant than than than water. And so um the main questions we have about three atlas were not really addressed.
And the I would say that the data that was released over the past week or two after three Atlas came out of the direction of the sun. So we can observe it from Earth. That data is far more interesting. It shows jets, multiple jets going in different directions. And we're yet to see a big telescope imaging those jets. So far we saw amateur astronomers telescopes. Uh and so these images are intriguing.
The question of whether three Atlas for example shows non-gravitational acceleration you know that's still being calculated debated that's another important insight about what happened to it when it came closest to the sun uh and of course as it gets closest to earth that will be on December 19th we'll have the best opportunity to use the hundreds of telescopes on earth and the Hubble and web space telescopes to get our best data on it. So, as far as I can tell, in terms of scientific output, there wasn't much uh offered in this press conference.
>> Plenty of questions for you. Uh, one question that was just posed. Uh, can you respond to their conversation about or their comments about it putting off nickel?
>> Well, uh, so indeed that's one of the anomalies. I listed 12 anomalies about 3i Atlas. One of them is that you know the the detection of nickel was not supplemented by significant detection of iron and in fact the first detection of nickel had no iron just an upper limit.
Uh very extreme ratio of nickel to iron that was never seen before in any comet.
Uh and obviously that's puzzling because nickel and iron are produced in exploding stars in similar amounts. And in fact for the solar composition there is more iron than nickel. So um we've never seen something like that. And you know when we uh for example find nickel from the impact of asteroids that are nickel rich they are also iron rich that there is never a situation where it's mostly nickel and very little iron except for industrial production of of alloys nickel alloys that are used for aerospace applications. So I mean they are always seeing whatever data we get as a a signature of an unusual comet.
Okay. So no matter how unusual the chemical composition would be they would say well it came from a different environment. What do you expect? Uh the main you know the main anomaly that I find the extremely puzzling and they didn't even mention it is the size of the object. So I based on on the data that we have by now which uh is not just the web telescope data that they mentioned but other details. It looks like the object is at least 5 kilometers in diameter and maybe more. And that means that it's at least a thousand times more massive than the previous comet. We know it's it was a comet Borisov discovered in 2019 and and moreover it's about a million times more massive than Amu Mua the first interstellar object. So when you see the third object being a thousand times more massive than the second and a million times more massive than the first it should raise a big question. How is that possible?
because we should have found a thousand borisovs and a million omuam muas before finding one giant icy iceberg of the type that we found.
So, uh this should be really a puzzle and they should have mentioned it as a puzzle but they don't even mention that.
And the second is why do we have it in the plane of the planets? I mean obviously it's a great fortune that all the NASA observatories can look at it and they mentioned the fact that they look at it they're really happy about the fact that they could monitor it all the time but the fact that fact that they can monitor it all the time is really a miracle cuz only one in 500 incoming objects would be aligned so well with the ecliptic plane of the planets that allows all these NASA assets to be used so they don't comment about that so all the things that appear extremely rare, you know, like all these features, maybe they say something that is not well understood. So NASA, you know, these administrators basically are trying to portray an image of an unusual comet because it came from a and a a different environment, but um they don't attend to the fact that there are extremely rare properties of this comet that should that should puzzle them that. So I think the appropriate response to that would be, you know, there there are very puzzling facts about this. It it is maybe it's a indeed it's a natural comet but it means that we don't understand the factories that make such things because if we get a such a big package that happens to be aligned with the plane of the planets and shows much more nickel than iron you know maybe there is something really fundamentally wrong with the way we think about the origin of this thing they don't even bring this up I mean I don't have an issue with them claiming it it must be natural but even if it's natural it seems to me that the main message is that you know we don't fully we are missing something. We don't know how such an object is generated created.
>> If it's not uh again we've we've got a ton of questions for you on on YouTube and I know your um your time is tight today. Um Adam says if they're billions of years old like you said wouldn't they have discovered a more efficient form of transportation rather than using a comet-like spacecraft? Wouldn't they have discovered faster than light travel, teleportation, wormhole, dimensional travel, etc. after billions of years? Uh, that's why I'm skeptical on this whole object being of alien origin.
>> Well, this is a strange question because whoever asked this question is skeptical because of ideas that have nothing to do with what we know about physics. We don't know if it's possible to travel fast and light. In fact, Einstein's theory of relativity says it's not. So the question the person who asks the question says why couldn't they discover faster than light travel? Well because as far as we know it doesn't exist.
Okay. And the second is wormholes. As far as we know it doesn't exist. We don't know how to make a wormhole. We don't know if it's possible to make a wormhole because then you would build a time machine that would violate the laws of physics. So as far as we know such things do not exist. So you can't ask a question saying they would have discovered it because we don't know that such things exist. Okay. Now you can ask why wasn't it moving faster than 10 to the minus 4 of the speed of light? You know in principle that's a good question. But if they were to move faster, we would never discover an object moving close to the speed of light because the telescopes would not record an object. They would basically get a a smearing of the light from the object along a a line and it would be very dim. and the observers would dismiss it as an object. So an object moving too fast, much faster than the typical speed of uh asteroids, comets in our solar system would be discarded. We will not hear about it. The observers will never report about it. So when you ask why don't we see things moving faster is because of a selection effect.
Our observations are not tuned to detect such objects.
>> Okay. So uh according to Rizzle he says according to the trajectory it entered our solar system where did three eye atlas come from?
>> We don't know where it came from because that depends on the duration of the journey and we have no no clock on it to tell us how long the journey was. Uh the only thing we have is that it moves at a high speed when it entered the solar system relative to the local population of stars. So the claim is well maybe it came from an old star because old stars are kicked around and they reach higher speeds. But the problem with that proposition and I wrote a paper related to that is that there is a caveat because you could imagine a parent star that is moving slowly and then the ejection speed from that parent star was large.
So, we don't know if the ejection speed was large or the original host star was moving fast. And therefore, we can't tell the age. There is no way for us to tell the age of the object unless we assume that the object acquired or inherited the original speed of its parent star, which is an assumption. We don't know if it's true or not because we don't know what the ejection mechanism was to and where did this object come from within the the vicinity of that star.
>> Isaac asked why do we have virtually no highresolution images of the details in the surface of the moon and Mars? Don't we have the right people to clear that data?
>> Oh, we do have images of the surface of the moon and Mars. But the when you say not enough resolution uh that is dictated by the aperture of the cameras that were used. So the there is the Mars uh or orbiter that is actually gave us detailed images of Mars. There was a lunar orbiter that gave us detailed images of the moon. But we can do much better and in the future hopefully there would be missions that would map those surfaces to much greater details. And uh moreover, as we go to the these places, we could map it from up close.
>> Robert says, "Why do the jets and plumes that appear to be coming from three Atlas seem to not be influenced by a 16-hour rotation?"
>> That's an excellent question. I asked the same. That's one of my anomalies.
you would expect um uh you know given the typical um speed of the material in those jets you would expect to see wiggles uh that we don't see and somehow the the jets are uh tightly cumated. So this is an important puzzle that needs to be addressed. Again, um you know, we we gain new knowledge in science out of asking questions or paying attention to anomalies. We we don't learn much by saying, "Oh, it's a comet. Comets do strange things and therefore we shouldn't worry about it." That's not the way we learn something new.
>> Lots of people bringing up how long it took them to release this data. Um this one says, "Why would NASA have a big event to release a picture of a simple rock? And with almost 50 days without releasing anything, why should we believe them? They are known to alter their images all the time. Um, bring smart back. That's what they'd say.
>> Well, uh, I wouldn't necessarily suggest that they modify the images, but uh, you know, NASA is a big bureaucratic organization and a bureaucracy rules. Uh so if there is a government shutdown they may have given instructions not to release any data related to triatlas because they want to they want it to be processed through the headquarters. Uh they didn't uh do the same about other data. For example the high-rise um camera was taking images of Mars and releasing them you know a day later. Um, you can look at the high-rise website and you will see images rel that were released during the the shutdown. No problem at all. However, the three the the image of 3i Atlas was uh waiting for 45 days before we got to see it and it wasn't particularly revealing anything you know insightful about the nature of the object. So I I do think that um it's just the the NASA bureaucracy that set some rule about FA Atlas. They wanted to have uh the the data publicly available after you know the the administrators have a chance to review it and I don't see anything beyond that. It's just the bureaucracy uh taking hostage the uh dissemination of scientific information. Uh, of course, if it was an academic institution where there is no uh threat from from shutdown and even if there was a a university that was shut down, that the scientists would still process it at their home and release the data immediately to the public, you know. So, it's a very different mentality, but but in a government organization, the employees are not allowed to do anything to overrule what the administration tells them. even if uh they can easily process the data.
>> I'm going to try to get to two or three more questions. This one says, "Ai, do you think the 1977 signal could have been from three Atlas as it is reported to have come from the same general direction?"
>> Yeah, that's an excellent question again related to one of the anomalies in my list of 12 on my you can check my um latest essay on medium.com where I discuss all 12. Um so I actually encouraged the radio observers to look at firatas to check if there there is any radio transmission and today there was a report from Mircat the radio observatory uh there and again it's discussed in my essay today and they put an upper limit at a particular range of frequencies radio frequencies uh they observed it on November uh 5th and so the limit is just applicable to that particular date and over some range of frequencies and uh during that time they were able to set an upper limit on the power transmitted as being less than that of a cell phone.
So you can say there was no cell phone on November 5th uh transmitting anything from 3i Atlas.
>> Okay. Um Dr. globe. If ThreeI Atlas were to change course or if it sent out smaller spacecraft or fragments of itself, how long would it take to arrive to Earth? Thank you for all that you do.
>> Thank you. So, if it changed course at roughly the same speed, not making it much faster. Um, then it would take a couple of months or so, a few months depending on exactly the details. Uh, and in fact, that was worked out in a paper that I co-authored.
um at in the middle of July that was published by now in a peer-review journal uh along with uh Adam Hbert and Adam Croll we considered the possibility that 3II Atlas is technological spacecraft and asked what kind of a velocity shift does it need to have in order to reach Earth at a particular date and you can look at our plots and you will see for any target date there is a different velocity shift that it needs to acquire at an earlier time and and so we give all kinds of scenarios for that.
>> How will we know that the images are authentic and not doctorred?
>> We will never know that uh because we don't have access to the instruments and the flow of data. But we have to trust NASA scientists and you know science is based on trust. As you can tell these days, if you go online, you would see a lot of fake data, misinformation. You can't trust people. But there is a code of honor in science that uh data should never be fabricated by scientists. And um you know there are rare examples where such fake where fake data was was produced and the scientists were punished severely for that. So I would be really surprised if that happened here. Um I trust scientists unless proven differently. Um and so I would just assume this is the data they have especially because it's not very very impressive. Now it's you might say oh well maybe the original data was much more impressive. I would find it really hard to imagine that they would make the im images fuzzier than they actually are.
>> Okay. So what happens now? Now, is your team going to stay up all night and analyze what we just saw?
>> Yeah, I I have some collaborators that would look into the data. I hope we will have access to that data uh and analyze it, see what kind of information we can get from it. But as I said at the beginning, I don't expect big news from that because the quality of the data doesn't look impressive to me. uh it will just be marginal to what we already know and really it's really the coming weeks I think where we will get new insights to to Free Atlas.
>> Aby we always appreciate you. Thank you so much for um uh staying on with us and taking so many of our viewers questions from YouTube uh and for analyzing all that we just heard whether it was impressive or not.
>> Thanks for having me. I will always tell you what I think and uh with me what you see is what you get. All right, let's leave it there, man. Thank you so much for your time. Appreciate it. Go ahead and bring in Harvard professor Avi. We have waited to be able to talk to you about this threeey atlas. And finally, we get some images from NASA. So, they say they are um opening a window into other solar systems. What was your reaction to what we just saw and heard?
>> Well, uh there wasn't much news, I must say. Um an hour before that press conference I was asked by a reporter what do I expect and I said I don't expect big news and NASA will repeat the official mantra that Frii Atlas is a natural comet and that they were unable to process the data until now because of the government shutdown and probably the high-rise image will show a fuzzy ball of light like the Hubble image but I hoped to be surprised and I was not.
>> Oh man.
>> Uh >> but we did see a new data uh but nothing major in terms of the insights as to the nature of the object. Um there was data presented in addition to the one we already saw from the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Web Space Telescopes, Ferex Swift. I mean these are things we already witnessed. There was some new data from the Lucy spacecraft, the Maven uh SOHO high-rise.
Um but again all these images were uh fuzzy. Uh there was no new insight offered by them and of course one would like to analyze those images. I mean they detected for example hydrogen from the spectrograph on Maven. Uh so that of course says say says something about the the production rate of water because hydrogen comes from the breakup of water molecules and one can also infer that from the detection of uh hydroxil radicals, oxygen and hydrogen molecules that were detected actually um a few weeks ago uh by a radio telescope um mircat and It was detected again today.
There was a report from early November.
So I mean these are details that can be combined to infer production rate of water. We already know that carbon dioxide based on web telescope data was uh much more abundant than than than water. And so um the main questions we have about reatlas were not really addressed. And I would say that the data that was released over the past week or two after three Atlas came out of the direction of the sun. So we can observe it from Earth. That data is far more interesting. It shows jets, multiple jets going in different directions. And we're yet to see a big telescope imaging those jets. So far we saw amateur astronomers telescopes. Uh and so these images are intriguing.
uh the question of whether 3i Atlas for example shows non-gravitational acceleration you know that's still being calculated debated uh that's another important insight about what happened to it when it came closest to the sun uh and of course as it gets closest to earth that will be on December 19th we'll have the best opportunity to use the hundreds of telescopes on earth and the Hubble and web space telescopes to get our best data on it. So, as far as I can tell, in terms of scientific output, there wasn't much uh offered >> in this press conference.
>> Plenty of questions for you. Uh one question that was just posed. Uh can you respond to their conversation about or their comments about it putting off nickel?
>> Well, uh so indeed that's one of the anomalies. I listed 12 anomalies about 3i Atlas. One of them is that you know the the detection of nickel was not supplemented by significant detection of iron and in fact the first detection of nickel had no iron just an upper limit.
Uh very extreme ratio of nickel to iron that was never seen before in any comet.
Uh and obviously that's puzzling because nickel and iron are produced in exploding stars in similar amounts. And in fact for the solar composition there is more iron than nickel. So um we've never seen something like that. And you know when we uh for example find nickel from the impact of asteroids that are nickel rich they are also iron rich that there is never a situation where it's mostly nickel and very little iron except for industrial production of of alloys nickel alloys that are used for aerospace applications. So I mean they are always seeing whatever data we get as a a signature of an unusual comet.
Okay. So no matter how unusual the chemical composition would be they would say well it came from a different environment. What do you expect? Uh the main you know the main anomaly that I find the extremely puzzling and they didn't even mention it is the size of the object. So I based on on the data that we have by now which uh is not just the web telescope data that they mentioned but uh other details. It looks like the object is at least 5 kilometers in diameter and maybe more and that means that it's at least a thousand times more massive than the previous comet. We know it's it was a comet Borisov discovered in 2019 and and moreover it's about a million times more massive than Amu Mua the first interstellar object. So when you see the third object being a thousand times more massive than the second and a million times more massive than the first it should raise a a big question. How is that possible?
because we should have found a thousand boriss and a million omu muas before finding one giant icy iceberg of the type that we found.
So, uh this should be really a puzzle and they should have mentioned it as a puzzle but they don't even mention that.
And the second is why do we have it in the plane of the planets? I mean obviously it's a great fortune that all the NASA observatories can look at it and they mention the fact that they look at it. They're really happy about the fact that they could monitor it all the time. But the fact that fact that they can monitor it all the time is really a miracle cuz only one in 500 incoming objects would be aligned so well with the ecliptic plane of the planets that allows all these NASA assets to be used.
>> So they don't comment about that. So all the things that appear extremely rare you know like all these features maybe they say something that is not well understood. So NASA, you know, these administrators basically are trying to portray an image of an unusual comet because it came from in a a different environment, but um they don't attend to the fact that there are extremely rare properties of this comet that should that should puzzle them that. So I think the appropriate response to that would be, you know, there there are very puzzling facts about this. It it's maybe it's a indeed it's a natural comet but it means that we don't understand the factories that make such things cuz if we get a such a big package that happens to be aligned with the plane of the planets and shows much more nickel than iron you know maybe there is something really fundamentally wrong with the way we think about the origin of these things they don't even bring this up I mean I don't have an issue with them claiming it it must be natural but even if it's natural it seems to me that the main message is that you know we don't fully we are missing something. We don't know how such an object is generated created.
>> If it's not uh again we've we've got a ton of questions for you on on YouTube and I know you're um your time is tight today. Um Adam says if they're billions of years old like you said, wouldn't they have discovered a more efficient form of transportation rather than using a comet-like spacecraft? Uh wouldn't they have discovered faster than light travel, teleportation, wormhole, dimensional travel, etc. after billions of years? Uh that's why I'm skeptical on this whole object being of alien origin.
>> Well, this is a strange question because whoever asked this question is skeptical because of ideas that have nothing to do with what we know about physics. We don't know if it's possible to travel fast and light. In fact, Einstein's theory of relativity says it's not. So the question the person who asked the question says why couldn't they discover faster than light travel? Well because as far as we know it doesn't exist.
Okay. And the second is wormholes. As far as we know it doesn't exist. We don't know how to make a wormhole. We don't know if it's possible to make a wormhole because then you would build a time machine that would violate the laws of physics. So as far as we know such things do not exist. So you can't ask a question saying they would have discovered it because we don't know that such things exist. Okay. Now you can ask why wasn't it moving faster than 10 to the minus 4 of the speed of light? You know in principle that's a good question. But if they were to move faster, we would never discover an object moving close to the speed of light because the telescopes would not record an object. They would basically get a a smearing of the light from the object along a a line and it would be very dim. And the observers would dismiss it as an object. So an object moving too fast, much faster than the typical speed of uh asteroids, comets in our solar system would be discarded. We will not hear about it. The observers will never report about it. So when you ask why don't we see things moving faster is because of a selection effect.
Our observations are not tuned to detect such objects.
>> Okay. So uh according to Rizzle he says according to the trajectory it entered our solar system where did three eye atlas come from?
>> We don't know where it came from because that depends on the duration of the journey and we have no no clock on it to tell us how long the journey was. Uh the only thing we have is that it moves at a high speed when it entered the solar system relative to the local population of stars. So the claim is well maybe it came from an old star because old stars are kicked around and they reach higher speeds. But the problem with that proposition and I wrote a paper related to that is that there is a caveat because you could imagine a parent star that is moving slowly and then the ejection speed from that parent star was large.
So, we don't know if the ejection speed was large or the original host star was moving fast. And therefore, we can't tell the age. There is no way for us to tell the age of the object unless we assume that the object acquired or inherited the original speed of its parent star, which is an assumption. We don't know if it's true or not because we don't know what the ejection mechanism was to and where did this object come from within the the vicinity of that star.
>> Isaac asked why do we have virtually no highresolution images of the details in the surface of the moon and Mars? Don't we have the right people to clear that data?
Oh, we do have images of the surface of the moon and Mars, but the when you say not enough resolution, uh that is dictated by the aperture of the cameras that were used. So the there is the Mars or orbiter that is actually gave us detailed images of Mars. There was a lunar orbiter that gave us detailed images of the moon. that we can do much better and in the future hopefully there would be missions that would map those surfaces to much greater details and uh moreover as we go to these places we could map it from up close.
>> Robert says why do the jets and plumes that appear to be coming from three Atlas seem to not be influenced by a 16-hour rotation?
>> That's an excellent question. I asked the same. That's one of my anomalies.
you would expect um uh you know given the typical um speed of the material in those jets you would expect to see wiggles uh that we don't see and um somehow the the jets are uh tightly cimated. So this is an important puzzle that needs to be addressed again. Um, you know, we we gain new knowledge in science out of asking questions or paying attention to anomalies. We we don't learn much by saying, "Oh, it's a comet. Comets do strange things and therefore we shouldn't worry about it."
That's not the way we learn something new.
>> Lots of people bringing up how long it took them to release this data. Um, this one says, "Why would NASA have a big event to release a picture of a simple rock? And with almost 50 days without releasing anything, why should we believe them? They are known to alter their images all the time. Um, bring smart back. That's what they'd say.
>> Well, uh, I wouldn't necessarily suggest that they modify the images, but uh, you know, NASA is a big bureaucratic organization and a bureaucracy rules. Uh so if there is a government shutdown they may have given instructions not to release any data related to triatlas because they want to they want it to be processed through the headquarters. Uh they didn't uh do the same about other data. For example the high-rise um camera was taking images of Mars and releasing them you know a day later. Um, you can look at the high-rise website and you will see images rel that were released during the the shutdown. No problem at all. However, the three the the image of 3i Atlas was uh waiting for 45 days before we got to see it and it wasn't particularly revealing anything you know insightful about the nature of the object. So I I do think that um it's just the the NASA bureaucracy that set some rule about FA atlas. They wanted to have uh the the data publicly available after you know the the administrators have a chance to review it and I don't see anything beyond that. It's just the bureaucracy uh taking hostage the uh dissemination of scientific information. Uh, of course, if it was a an academic institution where there is no uh threat from from shutdown and even if there was a a university that was shut down, the scientists would still process it at their home and release the data immediately to the public, you know. So, it's a very different mentality. But, but in a government organization, the employees are not allowed to do anything to overrule what the administration tells them. even if uh they can easily process the data.
>> I'm going to try to get to two or three more questions. This one says, "Avi, do you think the 1977 signal could have been from three Atlas as it is reported to have come from the same general direction?"
>> Yeah, that's an excellent question again related to one of the anomalies in my list of 12 on my you can check my um latest essay on medium.com where I discuss all 12. Um so I actually encouraged the radio observers to look at triatas to check if there there is any radio transmission and today there was a report from Mircat the radio observatory uh there and again it's discussed in my essay today and they put an upper limit at a particular range of frequencies radio frequencies uh they observed it on November uh 5th and so the limit is just applicable to that particular date and over some range of frequencies and uh during that time they were able to set an upper limit on the power transmitted as being less than that of a cell phone.
So you can say that there was no cell phone on November 5th uh transmitting anything from 3i Atlas.
>> Okay. Um Dr. globe. If ThreeI Atlas were to change course or if it sent out smaller spacecraft or fragments of itself, how long would it take to arrive to Earth? Thank you for all that you do.
>> Thank you. So, if it changed course at roughly the same speed, not making it much faster. Um, then it would take a couple of months or so, a few months depending on exactly the details. Uh, and in fact, that was worked out in a paper that I co-authored.
um at in the middle of July that was published by now in a peer-review journal uh along with u Adam Hibbert and Adam Croll we considered the possibility that 3i Atlas is technological spacecraft and asked what kind of a velocity shift does it need to have in order to reach earth at a particular date and you can look at our plots and you will see for any target date there is a different velocity shift that it needs to acquire at an earlier time and and so we give all kinds of scenarios for that.
>> How will we know that the images are authentic and not doctorred?
>> We will never know that uh because we don't have access to the instruments and the flow of data. But we have to trust NASA scientists and you know science is based on trust. As you can tell these days, if you go online, you would see a lot of fake data, misinformation. You can't trust people. But there is a code of honor in science that uh data should never be fabricated by scientists. And um you know there are rare examples where such fake where fake data was was produced and the scientists were punished severely for that. So I would be really surprised if that happened here. Um I trust scientists unless proven differently. Um and so I would just assume this is the data they have especially because it's not very very impressive. Now it's you might say oh well maybe the original data was much more impressive. I would find it really hard to imagine that they would make the im images fuzzier than they actually are.
>> Okay. So what happens now? Now, is your team going to stay up all night and analyze what we just saw?
>> Yeah, I I have some collaborators that would look into the data. I hope that we will have access to that data uh and analyze it, see what kind of information we can get from it. But as I said at the beginning, I don't expect big news from that because the quality of the data doesn't look impressive to me. uh it will just be marginal to what we already know and really it's really the coming weeks I think where we will get new insights to to free atlas.
>> Avi we always appreciate you. Thank you so much for um uh staying on with us and taking so many of our viewers questions from YouTube uh and for analyzing all that we just heard whether it was impressive or not.
>> Thanks for having me. I will always tell you what I think and uh with me what you see is what you get. All right, let's leave it there, man. Thank you so much for your time. Appreciate it. Go ahead and bring in Harvard professor Avi. We have waited to be able to talk to you about this threeey atlas. And finally, we get some images from NASA. So, they say they are um opening a window into other solar systems. What was your reaction to what we just saw and heard?
>> Well, uh there wasn't much news, I must say. Um, an hour before that press conference, I was asked by a reporter, what do I expect? And I said, I don't expect big news and NASA will repeat the official mantra that Frii Atlas is a natural comet and that they were unable to process the data until now because of the government shutdown. And probably the high-rise image will show a fuzzy ball of light like the Hubble image.
But uh I hoped to be surprised and I was not.
>> Oh man.
>> But we did see a new data uh but nothing major in terms of the insights as to the nature of the object. Um there was data presented in addition to the one we already saw from uh the Hubble space telescope, the James Web Space Telescopes, Ferex Swift. I mean these are things we already witnessed. There was some new data from the Lucy spacecraft, the Maven uh SOHO high-rise.
Um but again all these uh images were uh fuzzy uh there was no new insight offered by them and of course one would like to analyze those images. I mean they detected for example hydrogen from the spectrograph on maven. Uh so that of course says say says something about the the production rate of water because hydrogen comes from the breakup of water molecules and one can also infer that from the detection of uh hydroxil radicals oxygen and hydrogen molecules that were detected actually um a few weeks ago uh by a radio telescope um mircat and It was detected again today.
There was a report from early November.
So I mean these are details that can be combined to infer production rate of water. We already know that carbon dioxide based on web telescope data was uh much more abundant than than than water. And so um the main questions we have about three atlas were not really addressed.
And the I would say that the data that was released over the past week or two after three Atlas came out of the direction of the sun. So we can observe it from Earth. That data is far more interesting. It shows jets, multiple jets going in different directions. And we're yet to see a big telescope imaging those jets. So far we saw amateur astronomers telescopes. Uh and so these images are intriguing.
The question of whether three Atlas for example shows non-gravitational acceleration, you know, that's still being calculated, debated. Uh that's another important insight about what happened to it when it came closest to the sun. uh and of course as it gets closest to Earth that will be on December 19th we'll have the best opportunity to use the hundreds of telescopes on Earth and the Hubble and web space telescopes to get our best data on it. So as far as I can tell in terms of scientific output there wasn't much uh offered >> in this press conference.
>> Plenty of questions for you. Uh, one question that was just posed. Uh, can you respond to their conversation about or their comments about it putting off nickel?
>> Well, uh, so indeed that's one of the anomalies. I listed 12 anomalies about 3 Atlas. One of them is that, you know, the the detection of nickel was not supplemented by significant detection of iron. And in fact, the first detection of nickel had no iron, just an upper limit. uh very extreme ratio of nickel to iron that was never seen before in any comet. Uh and obviously that's puzzling because nickel and iron are produced in exploding stars in similar amounts. And in fact for the solar composition there is more iron than nickel. So um we've never seen something like that. And you know when we for example find nickel from the impact of asteroids that are nickel rich they are also ironri that that there is never a situation where it's mostly nickel and very little iron except for industrial production of of alloys nickel alloys that are used for aerospace applications. So I mean they are always seeing whatever data we get as a a signature of an unusual comet. Okay. So no matter how unusual the chemical composition would be, they would say, well, it came from a different environment. What do you expect? Uh the main, you know, the main anomaly that I find the extremely puzzling and they didn't even mention it is the size of the object. So I based on on the data that we have by now which uh is not just the web telescope data that they mentioned but other details. It looks like the object is at least 5 kilometers in diameter and maybe more. And that means that it's at least a thousand times more massive than the previous comet. We know it's it was a comet Borisov discovered in 2019 and and moreover it's about a million times more massive than Amu Mua the first interstellar object. So when you see the third object being a thousand times more massive than the second and a million times more massive than the first it should raise a a big question. How is that possible?
because we should have found a thousand borissovves and a million omu muas before finding one giant icy iceberg of the type that we found.
So, uh this should be really a puzzle and they should have mentioned it as a puzzle but they don't even mention that.
And the second is why do we have it in the plane of the planets? I mean obviously it's a great fortune that all the NASA observatories can look at it and they mention the fact that they look at it. They're really happy about the fact that they could monitor it all the time. But the fact that fact that they can monitor it all the time is really a miracle cuz only one in 500 incoming objects would be aligned so well with the ecliptic plane of the planets that allows all these NASA assets to be used.
>> So they don't comment about that. So all the things that appear extremely rare you know like all these features maybe they say something that is not well understood. So NASA, you know, these administrators basically are trying to portray an image of an unusual comet because it came from in a a different environment, but um they don't attend to the fact that there are extremely rare properties of this comet that should that should puzzle them that. So I think the appropriate response to that would be, you know, there there are very puzzling facts about this. It it's maybe it's a indeed it's a natural comet but it means that we don't understand the factories that make such things because if we get a such a big package that happens to be aligned with the plane of the planets and shows much more nickel than iron you know maybe there is something really fundamentally wrong with the way we think about the origin of this thing they don't even bring this up I mean I don't have an issue with them claiming it it must be natural but even if it's natural it seems to me that the main message is that you know we don't fully we are missing something. We don't know how such an object is generated created.
>> If it's not uh again we've we've got a ton of questions for you on on YouTube and I know you're um your time is tight today. Um Adam says if they're billions of years old like you said, wouldn't they have discovered a more efficient form of transportation rather than using a comet-like spacecraft? Uh wouldn't they have discovered faster than light travel, teleportation, wormhole, dimensional travel, etc. after billions of years? Uh that's why I'm skeptical on this whole object being of alien origin.
>> Well, this is a strange question because whoever asked this question is skeptical because of ideas that have nothing to do with what we know about physics. We don't know if it's possible to travel fast and light. In fact, Einstein's theory of relativity says it's not. So the question the person who asks the question says why couldn't they discover faster than light travel? Well because as far as we know it doesn't exist.
Okay. And the second is wormholes. As far as we know it doesn't exist. We don't know how to make a wormhole. We don't know if it's possible to make a wormhole because then you would build a time machine that would violate the laws of physics. So as far as we know such things do not exist. So you can't ask a question saying they would have discovered it because we don't know that such things exist. Okay. Now you can ask why wasn't it moving faster than 10 the minus 4 of the speed of light? You know in principle that's a good question. But if they were to move faster, we would never discover an object moving close to the speed of light because the telescopes would not record an object.
They would basically get a a smearing of the light from the object along a a line and it would be very dim. And the observers would dismiss it as an object.
So an object moving too fast, much faster than the typical speed of uh asteroids, comets in our solar system would be discarded. We will not hear about it. The observers will never report about it. So when you ask why don't we see things moving faster is because of a selection effect. Our observations are not tuned to detect such objects.
>> Okay. So uh according to Rizzle he says according to the trajectory it entered our solar system where did three eye atlas come from?
>> We don't know where it came from because that depends on the duration of the journey and we have no no clock on it to tell us how long the journey was. Uh the only thing we have is that it moves at a high speed when it entered the solar system relative to the local population of stars. So the claim is well maybe it came from an old star because old stars are kicked around and they reach higher speeds. But the problem with that proposition and I wrote a paper related to that is that there is a caveat because you could imagine a parent star that is moving slowly and then the ejection speed from that parent star was large.
So, we don't know if the ejection speed was large or the original host star was moving fast. And therefore, we can't tell the age. There is no way for us to tell the age of the object unless we assume that the object acquired or inherited the original speed of its parent star, which is an assumption. We don't know if it's true or not because we don't know what the ejection mechanism was to and where did this object come from within the the vicinity of that star.
>> Isaac asked why do we have virtually no highresolution images of the details in the surface of the moon and Mars? Don't we have the right people to clear that data?
Oh, we do have images of the surface of the moon and Mars, but the when you say not enough resolution, uh that is dictated by the aperture of the cameras that were used. So the there is the Mars or orbiter that is actually gave us detailed images of Mars. There was a lunar orbiter that gave us detailed images of the moon. But we can do much better and in the future hopefully there would be missions that would map those surfaces to much greater details and uh moreover as we go to these places we could map it from up close.
>> Robert says why do the jets and plumes that appear to be coming from three Atlas seem to not be influenced by a 16-hour rotation?
>> That's an excellent question. I ask the same. That's one of my anomalies. you would expect um erh you know given the typical um speed of the material in those jets you would expect to see wiggles uh that we don't see and um somehow the the jets are uh tightly cimated. So this is an important puzzle that needs to be addressed. Again, um you know, we we gain new knowledge in science out of asking questions or paying attention to anomalies. We we don't learn much by saying, "Oh, it's a comet. Comets do strange things and therefore we shouldn't worry about it."
That's not the way we learn something new.
>> Lots of people bringing up how long it took them to release this data. Um uh this one says, "Why would NASA have a big event to release a picture of a simple rock? And with almost 50 days without releasing anything, why should we believe them? They are known to alter their images all the time. Um bring smart back." That's what they'd say. Well, uh I wouldn't necessarily suggest that they modify the images, but uh you know NASA is a big bureaucratic organization and a bureaucracy rules. Uh so if there is a government shutdown, they may have given instructions not to release any data related to Triatlas because they want to they want it to be processed through the headquarters.
uh they didn't uh do the same about other data. For example, the high-rise um camera was taking images of Mars and releasing them, you know, a day later.
Um you can look at the high-rise website and you will see images rel that were released during the the shutdown. No problem at all. However, the three the the image of three Atlas was uh waiting for 45 days before we got to see it and it wasn't particularly revealing anything you know insightful about the nature of the object. So I I do think that um it's just the the NASA bureaucracy that set some rule about Fatlas. they wanted to have uh the the data publicly available after you know the the administrators have a chance to review it and I don't see anything beyond that it's just the bureaucracy uh taking hostage the uh dissemination of scientific information uh of course if it was an academic institution where there is no uh threat from from shutdown and even if there was a a university that was shut down. The the scientists would still process it at their home and release the data immediately to the public, you know. So, it's a very different mentality, but but in a government organization, the employees are not allowed to do anything to overrule what the administration tells them, even if uh they can easily process the data.
>> I'm going to try to get to two or three more questions. This one says, "Avi, do you think the 1977 signal could have been from three Atlas as it is reported to have come from the same general direction?"
>> Yeah, that's an excellent question again related to one of the anomalies in my list of 12 on my you can check my um latest essay on medium.com where I discuss all 12. Um so I actually encouraged the radio observers to look at triatas to check if there there is any radio transmission and today there was a report from Mircat the radio observatory uh there and again it's discussed in my essay today and they put an upper limit at a particular range of frequencies radio frequencies uh they observed it on November uh 5th and so the limit is just applicable to that particular date and over some range of frequencies and uh during that time they were able to set an upper limit on the power transmitted that as being less than that of a cell phone. So you can say that there was no cell phone on November 5th uh transmitting anything from 3i Atlas.
>> Okay. Um Dr. lobe. If ThreeI Atlas were to change course or if it sent out smaller spacecraft or fragments of itself, how long would it take to arrive to Earth? Thank you for all that you do.
>> Thank you. So, if it changed course at roughly the same speed, not making it much faster. Um, then it would take a couple of months or so, a few months depending on exactly the details. Uh, and in fact, that was worked out in a paper that I co-authored.
um at in the middle of July that was published by now in a peer-review journal uh along with u Adam Hibbert and Adam Croll we considered the possibility that 3i Atlas is technological spacecraft and asked what kind of a velocity shift does it need to have in order to reach earth at a particular date and you can look at our plots and you will see for any target date there is a different velocity shift that it needs to acquire at an earlier time and and so we give all kinds of scenarios for that.
>> How will we know that the images are authentic and not doctorred?
>> We will never know that uh because we don't have access to the instruments and the flow of data. But we have to trust NASA scientists and you know science is based on trust. As you can tell these days, if you go online, you would see a lot of fake data, misinformation. You can't trust people. But there is a code of honor in science that uh data should never be fabricated by scientists. And um you know there are rare examples where such fake where fake data was was produced and the scientists were punished severely for that. So I would be really surprised if that happened here. Um I trust scientists unless proven differently. Um and so I would just assume this is the data they have especially because it's not very very impressive. Now it's you might say oh well maybe the original data was much more impressive. I would find it really hard to imagine that they would make the im images fuzzier than they actually are.
>> Okay. So what happens now? Now, is your team going to stay up all night and analyze what we just saw?
>> Yeah, I I have some collaborators that would look into the data. I hope we will have access to that data uh and analyze it, see what kind of information we can get from it. But as I said at the beginning, I don't expect big news from that because the quality of the data doesn't look impressive to me. uh it will just be marginal to what we already know and really it's really the coming weeks I think where we will get new insights to to free Atlas.
>> AI we always appreciate you. Thank you so much for um uh staying on with us and taking so many of our viewers questions from YouTube uh and for analyzing all that we just heard whether it was impressive or not.
>> Thanks for having me. I will always tell you what I think and uh with me what you see is what you get. All right, let's leave it there, man. Thank you so much for your time. Appreciate it. Go ahead and bring in Harvard professor Avi Lobo.
We have waited to be able to talk to you about this threeey atlas. And finally, we get some images from NASA. So, they say they are um opening a window into other solar systems. What was your reaction to what we just saw and heard?
>> Well, uh there wasn't much news, I must say. Um an hour before that press conference I was asked by a reporter what do I expect and I said I don't expect big news and NASA will repeat the official mantra that FIA Atlas is a natural comet and that they were unable to process the data until now because of the government shutdown and probably the high-rise image will show a fuzzy ball of light like the Hubble image but I hoped to be surprised and I was not.
>> Oh man.
>> Uh >> but we did see a new data uh but nothing major in terms of the insights as to the nature of the object. Um there was data presented in addition to the one we already saw from the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Web Space Telescopes, Ferex Swift. I mean these are things we already witnessed. There was some new data from the Lucy spacecraft, Maven uh SOHO high-rise. Um but again all these images were uh fuzzy. Uh there was no new insight offered by them and of course one would like to analyze those images. I mean they detected for example hydrogen from the spectrograph on Maven. Uh so that of course says say says something about the the production rate of water because hydrogen comes from the breakup of water molecules and one can also infer that from the detection of uh hydroxil radicals, oxygen and hydrogen molecules that were detected actually um a few weeks ago uh by a radio telescope um mirat and It was detected again today.
There was a report from early November.
So I mean these are details that can be combined to infer production rate of water. We already know that carbon dioxide based on web telescope data was uh much more abundant than than water.
And so um the main questions we have about three atlas were not really addressed.
And the I would say that the data that was released over the past week or two after three Atlas came out of the direction of the sun. So we can observe it from Earth. That data is far more interesting. It shows jets, multiple jets going in different directions. And we're yet to see a big telescope imaging those jets. So far we saw amateur astronomers telescopes. Uh and so these images are intriguing.
The question of whether three atlas for example shows non-gravitational acceleration you know that's still being calculated debated that's another important insight about what happened to it when it came closest to the sun uh and of course as it gets closest to earth that will be on December 19th we'll have the best opportunity to use the hundreds of telescopes on earth and the Hubble and web space telescopes to get our best data on it. So, as far as I can tell, in terms of scientific output, there wasn't much uh offered >> in this press conference.
>> Plenty of questions for you. Uh one question that was just posed. Uh can you respond to their conversation about or their comments about it putting off nickel?
>> Well, uh so indeed that's one of the anomalies. I listed 12 anomalies about 3i Atlas. One of them is that you know the the detection of nickel was not supplemented by significant detection of iron and in fact the first detection of nickel had no iron just an upper limit.
Uh very extreme ratio of nickel to iron that was never seen before in any comet.
Uh and obviously that's puzzling because nickel and iron are produced in exploding stars in similar amounts. And in fact for the solar composition there is more iron than nickel. So um we've never seen something like that. And you know when we uh for example find nickel from the impact of asteroids that are nickel rich they are also iron rich that there is never a situation where it's mostly nickel and very little iron except for industrial production of of alloys nickel alloys that are used for aerospace applications. So I mean they are always seeing um whatever data we get as a a signature of an unusual comet. Okay. So no matter how unusual the chemical composition would be they would say well it came from a different environment. What do you expect? Uh the main you know the main anomaly that I find the extremely puzzling and they didn't even mention it is the size of the object. So I based on on the data that we have by now which uh is not just the web telescope data that they mentioned but other details. It looks like the object is at least 5 kilometers in diameter and maybe more. And that means that it's at least a thousand times more massive than the previous comet. We know it's it was a comet Borisov discovered in 2019 and and moreover it's about a million times more massive than Amu Mua the first interstellar object. So when you see the third object being a thousand times more massive than the second and a million times more massive than the first it should raise a big question. How is that possible?
because we should have found a thousand borisovs and a million omu muas before finding one giant icy iceberg of the type that we found.
So, uh this should be really a puzzle and they should have mentioned it as a puzzle but they don't even mention that.
And the second is why do we have it in the plane of the planets? I mean obviously it's a great fortune that all the NASA observatories can look at it and they mention the fact that they look at it they're really happy about the fact that they could monitor it all the time but the fact that fact that they can monitor it all the time is really a miracle cuz only one in 500 incoming objects would be aligned so well with the ecliptic plane of the planets that allows all these NASA assets to be used.
>> So they don't comment about that. So all the things that appear extremely rare you know like all these features maybe they say something that is not well understood. So NASA, you know, these administrators basically are trying to portray an image of an unusual comet because it came from in a a different environment, but um they don't attend to the fact that there are extremely rare properties of this comet that should that should puzzle them that. So I think the appropriate response to that would be, you know, there there are very puzzling facts about this. It it's maybe it's a indeed it's a natural comet but it means that we don't understand the factories that make such things because if we get a such a big package that happens to be aligned with the plane of the planets and shows much more nickel than iron you know maybe there is something really fundamentally wrong with the way we think about the origin of this thing they don't even bring this up I mean I don't have an issue with them claiming it it must be natural but even if it's natural it seems to me that the main message is that you know we don't fully we are missing something. We don't know how such an object is generated created.
>> If it's not uh again we've we've got a ton of questions for you on on YouTube and I know you're um your time is tight today. Um Adam says if they're billions of years old like you said wouldn't they have discovered a more efficient form of transportation rather than using a comet-like spacecraft? But wouldn't they have discovered faster than light travel, teleportation, wormhole, dimensional travel, etc. after billions of years? Uh, that's why I'm skeptical on this whole object being of alien origin.
>> Well, this is a strange question because whoever asked this question is skeptical because of ideas that have nothing to do with what we know about physics. We don't know if it's possible to travel fast and light. In fact, Einstein's theory of relativity says it's not. So the question the person who asks the question says why couldn't they discover faster than light travel? Well because as far as we know it doesn't exist.
Okay. And the second is wormholes. As far as we know it doesn't exist. We don't know how to make a wormhole. We don't know if it's possible to make a wormhole because then you would build a time machine that would violate the laws of physics. So as far as we know such things do not exist. So you can't ask a question saying they would have discovered it because we don't know that such things exist. Okay. Now you can ask why wasn't it moving faster than 10 the minus 4 of the speed of light? You know in principle that's a good question. But if they were to move faster, we would never discover an object moving close to the speed of light because the telescopes would not record an object.
They would basically get a a smearing of the light from the object along a a line and it would be very dim. and the observers would dismiss it as an object.
So an object moving too fast, much faster than the typical speed of uh asteroids, comets in our solar system would be discarded. We will not hear about it. The observers will never report about it. So when you ask why don't we see things moving faster is because of a selection effect. Our observations are not tuned to detect such objects.
>> Okay. So uh according to Rizzle he says according to the trajectory it entered our solar system where did three eye atlas come from?
>> We don't know where it came from because that depends on the duration of the journey and we have no no clock on it to tell us how long the journey was. Uh the only thing we have is that it moves at a high speed when it entered the solar system relative to the local population of stars. So the claim is well maybe it came from an old star because old stars are kicked around and they reach higher speeds. But the problem with that proposition and I wrote a paper related to that is that there is a caveat because you could imagine a parent star that is moving slowly and then the ejection speed from that parent star was large.
So, we don't know if the ejection speed was large or the original host star was moving fast. And therefore, we can't tell the age. There is no way for us to tell the age of the object unless we assume that the object acquired or inherited the original speed of its parent star, which is an assumption. We don't know if it's true or not because we don't know what the ejection mechanism was to and where did this object come from within the the vicinity of that star.
>> Isaac asked why do we have virtually no highresolution images of the details in the surface of the moon and Mars? Don't we have the right people to clear that data?
>> Oh, we do have images of the surface of the moon and Mars. But the when you say not enough resolution uh that is dictated by the aperture of the cameras that were used. So the there is the Mars uh or orbiter that is actually gave us detailed images of Mars. There was a lunar orbiter that gave us detailed images of the moon. But we can do much better and in the future hopefully there would be missions that would map those surfaces to much greater details. And uh moreover, as we go to the these places, we could map it from up close.
>> Robert says, "Why do the jets and plumes that appear to be coming from three Atlas seem to not be influenced by a 16-hour rotation?"
>> That's an excellent question. I asked the same. That's one of my anomalies.
you would expect um uh you know given the typical um speed of the material in those jets you would expect to see wiggles uh that we don't see and somehow the the jets are uh tightly cimated. So this is an important puzzle that needs to be addressed. Again, um you know, we we gain new knowledge in science out of asking questions or paying attention to anomalies. We we don't learn much by saying, "Oh, it's a comet. Comets do strange things and therefore we shouldn't worry about it." That's not the way we learn something new.
>> Lots of people bringing up how long it took them to release this data. Um this one says, "Why would NASA have a big event to release a picture of a simple rock? And with almost 50 days without releasing anything, why should we believe them? They are known to alter their images all the time. Um, bring smart back. That's what they'd say.
>> Well, uh, I wouldn't necessarily suggest that they modify the images, but uh, you know, NASA is a big bureaucratic organization and a bureaucracy rules. Uh so if there is a government shutdown they may have given instructions not to release any data related to triatlas because they want to they want it to be processed through the headquarters. Uh they didn't uh do the same about other data. For example the high-rise um camera was taking images of Mars and releasing them you know a day later. Um, you can look at the high-rise website and you will see images rel that were released during the the shutdown. No problem at all. However, the three the the image of 3i Atlas was uh waiting for 45 days before we got to see it and it wasn't particularly revealing anything you know insightful about the nature of the object. So I I do think that um it's just the the NASA bureaucracy that set some rule about FA Atlas. They wanted to have uh the the data publicly available after you know the the administrators have a chance to review it and I don't see anything beyond that. It's just the bureaucracy uh taking hostage the uh dissemination of scientific information. Uh, of course, if it was an academic institution where there is no uh threat from from shutdown and even if there was a a university that was shut down, that the scientists would still process it at their home and release the data immediately to the public, you know. So, it's a very different mentality. But, but in a government organization, the employees are not allowed to do anything to overrule what the administration tells them. even if uh they can easily process the data.
>> I'm going to try to get to two or three more questions. This one says, "Ai, do you think the 1977 signal could have been from three Atlas as it is reported to have come from the same general direction?"
>> Yeah, that's an excellent question again related to one of the anomalies in my list of 12 on my you can check my um latest essay on medium.com where I discuss all 12. Um so I actually encouraged the radio observers to look at friatas to check if there there is any radio transmission and today there was a report from Mircat the radio observatory uh there and again it's discussed in my essay today and they put an upper limit at a particular range of frequencies radio frequencies uh they observed it on November uh 5th and so the limit is just applicable to that particular date and over some range of frequencies and uh during that time they were able to set an upper limit on the power transmitted that as being less than that of a cell phone. So you can say there was no cell phone on November 5th uh transmitting anything from 3i Atlas.
>> Okay. Um Dr. lobe. If ThreeI Atlas were to change course or if it sent out smaller spacecraft or fragments of itself, how long would it take to arrive to Earth? Thank you for all that you do.
>> Thank you. So, if it changed course at roughly the same speed, not making it much faster. Um, then it would take a couple of months or so, a few months depending on exactly the details. Uh, and in fact, that was worked out in a paper that I co-authored.
um at in the middle of July that was published by now in a peer-review journal uh along with u Adam Hibbert and Adam Croll we considered the possibility that 3A Atlas is technological spacecraft and asked what kind of a velocity shift does it need to have in order to reach earth at a particular date and you can look at our plots and you will see for any target date there is a different velocity shift that it needs to acquire at an earlier time and and so we give all kinds of scenarios for that.
>> How will we know that the images are authentic and not doctorred?
>> We will never know that uh because we don't have access to the instruments and the flow of data. But we have to trust NASA scientists and you know science is based on trust. As you can tell these days, if you go online, you would see a lot of fake data, misinformation. You can't trust people. But there is a code of honor in science that uh data should never be fabricated by scientists. And um you know there are rare examples where such fake where fake data was was produced and the scientists were punished severely for that. So I would be really surprised if that happened here. Um I trust scientists unless proven differently. Um and so I would just assume this is the data they have especially because it's not very very impressive. Now it's you might say oh well maybe the original data was much more impressive. I would find it really hard to imagine that they would make the im images fuzzier than they actually are.
>> Okay. So what happens now? Is your team going to stay up all night and analyze what we just saw?
>> Yeah, I I have some collaborators that would look into the data. I hope we will have access to that data uh and analyze it, see what kind of information we can get from it. But as I said at the beginning, I don't expect big news from that because the quality of the data doesn't look impressive to me. uh it will just be marginal to what we already know and really it's really the coming weeks I think where we will get new insights to to free Atlas.
>> AI we always appreciate you. Thank you so much for um uh staying on with us and taking so many of our viewers questions from YouTube uh and for analyzing all that we just heard whether it was impressive or not.
>> Thanks for having me. I will always tell you what I think and uh with me what you see is what you get.
>> All right, let's leave it there, man.
Thank you so much for your time.
Appreciate it. Go ahead and bring in Harvard professor Avi Lobo. We have waited to be able to talk to you about this threeey atlas. And finally, we get some images from NASA. So, they say they are um opening a window into other solar systems. What was your reaction to what we just saw and heard?
Well, uh, there wasn't much news, I must say. Um, an hour before that press conference, I was asked by a reporter, what do I expect? And I said, I don't expect big news and NASA will repeat the official mantra that FIA Atlas is a natural comet and that they were unable to process the data until now because of the government shutdown. And probably the high-rise image will show a fuzzy ball of light like the Hubble image.
But uh I hoped to be surprised and I was not.
>> Oh man. uh >> but we did see a new data uh but nothing major in terms of the insights as to the nature of been desperately trying to >> there was data presented in addition to the one we already saw from the Hubble space telescope the James web space telescopes Ferex swift test I mean these are things we already witnessed there was some new data from the Lucy spacecraft maven uh Soho high-rise. Um but again all these images were fuzzy. Uh there was no new insight offered by them and of course one would like to analyze those images. I mean they detected for example hydrogen from the spectrograph on Maven. Uh so that of course says say says something about the the production rate of water because hydrogen comes from the breakup of water molecules and one can also infer that from the detection of uh hydroxil radicals, oxygen and hydrogen molecules that were detected actually um a few weeks ago uh by a radio telescope um mircat and it was detected again today.
There was a report from uh early November. So I mean these are details that can be combined to infer production rate of water. We already know that carbon dioxide based on web telescope data was uh much more abundant than than water. And so um the main questions we have about three atlas were not really addressed.
And the I would say that the data that was released over the past week or two after three Atlas came out of the direction of the sun. So we can observe it from Earth. That data is far more interesting. It shows jets, multiple jets going in different directions. And we're yet to see a big telescope imaging those jets. So far we saw amateur astronomers telescopes. Uh and so these images are intriguing.
uh the question of whether three Atlas for example shows non-gravitational acceleration you know that's still being calculated debated uh that's another important insight about what happened to it when it came closest to the sun uh and of course as it gets closest to earth that will be on December 19th we'll have the best opportunity to use the hundreds of telescopes on earth and the Hubble and web space telescopes to get our best data on it. So, as far as I can tell, in terms of scientific output, there wasn't much uh offered >> in this press conference.
>> Plenty of questions for you. Uh one question that was just posed. Uh can you respond to their conversation about or their comments about it putting off nickel?
>> Well, uh so indeed that's one of the anomalies. I listed 12 anomalies about 3i Atlas. One of them is that you know the the detection of nickel was not supplemented by significant detection of iron. And in fact the first detection of nickel had no iron just an upper limit.
Uh very extreme ratio of nickel to iron that was never seen before in any comet.
Uh and obviously that's puzzling because nickel and iron are produced in exploding stars in similar amounts. And in fact for the solar composition there is more iron than nickel. So um we've never seen something like that. And you know when we uh for example find nickel from the impact of asteroids that are nickel rich they are also iron rich that there is never a situation where it's mostly nickel and very little iron except for industrial production of of alloys nickel alloys that are used for aerospace applications. So I mean they are always seeing whatever data we get as a a signature of an unusual comet.
Okay. So no matter how unusual the chemical composition would be, they would say well it came from a different environment. What do you expect? Uh the main you know the main anomaly that I find the extremely puzzling and they didn't even mention it is the size of the object. So I based on on the data that we have by now which uh is not just the web telescope data that they mentioned but other details. It looks like the object is at least 5 kilometers in diameter and maybe more. And that means that it's at least a thousand times more massive than the previous comet. We know it's it was a comet Borisov discovered in 2019 and and moreover it's about a million times more massive than Amu Mua the first interstellar object. So when you see the third object being a thousand times more massive than the second and a million times more massive than the first it should raise a big question. How is that possible?
because we should have found a thousand borisovs and a million omuam muas before finding one giant icy iceberg of the type that we found.
So, uh this should be really a puzzle and they should have mentioned it as a puzzle but they don't even mention that.
And the second is why do we have it in the plane of the planets? I mean obviously it's a great fortune that all the NASA observatories can look at it and they mentioned the fact that they look at it they're really happy about the fact that they could monitor it all the time but the fact that fact that they can monitor it all the time is really a miracle cuz only one in 500 incoming objects would be aligned so well with the ecliptic plane of the planets that allows all these NASA assets to be used.
>> So they don't comment about that. So all the things that appear extremely rare you know like all these features maybe they say something that is not well understood. So NASA, you know, these administrators basically are trying to portray an image of an unusual comet because it came from an in a a different environment, but um they don't attend to the fact that there are extremely rare properties of this comet that should that should puzzle them that. So I think the appropriate response to that would be, you know, there there are very puzzling facts about this. It is maybe it's a indeed it's a natural comet but it means that we don't understand the factories that make such things because if we get a such a big package that happens to be aligned with the plane of the planets and shows much more nickel than iron you know maybe there is something really fundamentally wrong with the way we think about the origin of these things they don't even bring this up I mean I don't have an issue with them claiming it it must be natural but even if it's natural it seems to me that the main message is that you know we don't fully we are missing something.
We don't know how such an object is generated created.
>> If it's not uh again we've we've got a ton of questions for you on on YouTube and I know you're um your time is tight today. Um Adam says if they're billions of years old like you said wouldn't they have discovered a more efficient form of transportation rather than using a comet-like spacecraft? Wouldn't they have discovered faster than light travel, teleportation, wormhole, dimensional travel, etc. after billions of years? Uh, that's why I'm skeptical on this whole object being of alien origin.
>> Well, this is a strange question because whoever asked this question is skeptical because of ideas that have nothing to do with what we know about physics. We don't know if it's possible to travel fast and light. In fact, Einstein's theory of relativity says it's not. So the question the person who asks the question says why couldn't they discover faster than light travel? Well because as far as we know it doesn't exist.
Okay. And the second is wormholes. As far as we know it doesn't exist. We don't know how to make a wormhole. We don't know if it's possible to make a wormhole because then you would build a time machine that would violate the laws of physics. So as far as we know such things do not exist. So you can't ask a question saying they would have discovered it because we don't know that such things exist. Okay. Now you can ask why wasn't it moving faster than 10 the minus 4 of the speed of light? You know in principle that's a good question. But if they were to move faster, we would never discover an object moving close to the speed of light because the telescopes would not record an object.
they would basically get a a smearing of the light from the object along a a line and it would be very dim and the observers would dismiss it as an object.
So an object moving too fast much faster than the typical speed of asteroids, comets in our solar system would be discarded. We will not hear about it.
The observers will never report about it. So when you ask why don't we see things moving faster it's because of a selection effect. Our observations are not tuned to detect such objects.
Okay. So uh according to Rizzle he says according to the trajectory it entered our solar system. Where did three atlas come from?
We don't know where it came from because that depends on the duration of the journey and we have no no clock on it to tell us how long the journey was. uh the only thing we have is that it moves at a high speed when it entered the solar system relative to the local population of stars. So the claim is well maybe it came from an old star because old stars are kicked around and they reach higher speeds. But the problem with that proposition and I wrote a paper related to that is that there is a caveat because you could imagine a parent star that is moving slowly and then the ejection speed from that parent star was large.
So, we don't know if the ejection speed was large or the original host star was moving fast. And therefore, we can't tell the age. There is no way for us to tell the age of the object unless we assume that the object acquired or inherited the original speed of its parent star, which is an assumption. We don't know if it's true or not because we don't know what the ejection mechanism was to and where did this object come from within the the vicinity of that star.
>> Isaac asked why do we have virtually no highresolution images of the details in the surface of the moon and Mars? Don't we have the right people to clear that data?
>> Oh, we do have images of the surface of the moon and Mars. But the when you say not enough resolution uh that is dictated by the aperture of the cameras that were used. So the there is the Mars uh or orbiter that is actually gave us detailed images of Mars. There was a lunar orbiter that gave us detailed images of the moon. But we can do much better and in the future hopefully there would be missions that would map those surfaces to much greater details. And uh moreover, as we go to the these places, we could map it from up close.
>> Robert says, "Why do the jets and plumes that appear to be coming from three Atlas seem to not be influenced by a 16-hour rotation?"
>> That's an excellent question. I asked the same. That's one of my anomalies.
you would expect um uh you know given the typical um uh speed of the material in those jets you would expect to see wiggles uh that we don't see and somehow the the jets are uh tightly cumated. So this is an important puzzle that needs to be addressed. Again, um you know, we we gain new knowledge in science out of asking questions or paying attention to anomalies. We we don't learn much by saying, "Oh, it's a comet. Comets do strange things and therefore we shouldn't worry about it." That's not the way we learn something new.
>> Lots of people bringing up how long it took them to release this data. Um this one says, "Why would NASA have a big event to release a picture of a simple rock? And with almost 50 days without releasing anything, why should we believe them? They are known to alter their images all the time. Um, bring smart back. That's what they'd say.
>> Well, uh, I wouldn't necessarily suggest that they modify the images, but uh, you know, NASA is a big bureaucratic organization and a bureaucracy rules. Uh so if there is a government shutdown they may have given instructions not to release any data related to triatlas because they want to they want it to be processed through the headquarters. Uh they didn't uh do the same about other data. For example the high-rise um camera was taking images of Mars and releasing them you know a day later. Um, you can look at the high-rise website and you will see images rel that were released during the the shutdown. No problem at all. However, the three the the image of three Atlas was uh waiting for 45 days before we got to see it and it wasn't particularly revealing anything, you know, insightful about the nature of the object. So I I do think that um it's just the the NASA bureaucracy that set some rule about FA Atlatas. They wanted to have the the data publicly available after you know the the administrators have a chance to review it and I don't see anything beyond that. It's just the bureaucracy uh taking hostage the dissemination of scientific information. Uh, of course, if it was an academic institution where there is no uh threat from from shutdown and even if there was a a university that was shut down, the scientists would still process it at their home and release the data immediately to the public, you know. So, it's a very different mentality, but but in a government organization, the employees are not allowed to do anything to overrule what the administration tells them. even if uh they can easily process the data.
>> I'm going to try to get to two or three more questions. This one says, "Ai, do you think the 1977 signal could have been from three Atlas as it is reported to have come from the same general direction?"
>> Yeah, that's an excellent question again related to one of the anomalies in my list of 12 on my you can check my um latest essay on medium.com where I discuss all 12. Um so I actually encouraged the radio observers to look at friatas to check if there there is any radio transmission and today there was a report from Mircat the radio observatory uh there and again it's discussed in my essay today and they put an upper limit at a particular range of frequencies radio frequencies uh they observed it on November uh 5th and so the limit is just applicable to that particular date and over some range of frequencies and uh during that time they were able to set an upper limit on the power transmitted that as being less than that of a cell phone. So you can say there was no cell phone on November 5th uh transmitting anything from 3i Atlas.
>> Okay. Um Dr. lobe. If ThreeI Atlas were to change course or if it sent out smaller spacecraft or fragments of itself, how long would it take to arrive to Earth? Thank you for all that you do.
>> Thank you. So, if it changed course at roughly the same speed, not making it much faster. Um, then it would take a couple of months or so, a few months depending on exactly the details. Uh, and in fact, that was worked out in a paper that I co-authored.
um at in the middle of July that was published by now in a peer-review journal uh along with uh Adam Hibbert and Adam Croll we considered the possibility that 3AI Atlas is technological spacecraft and asked what kind of a velocity shift does it need to have in order to reach earth at a particular date and you can look at our plots and you will see for any target date there is a different velocity shift that it needs to acquire at an earlier time and and so we give all kinds of scenarios for that.
>> How will we know that the images are authentic and not doctorred?
>> We will never know that uh because we don't have access to the instruments and the flow of data. But we have to trust NASA scientists and you know science is based on trust. As you can tell these days, if you go online, you would see a lot of fake data, misinformation. You can't trust people. But there is a code of honor in science that uh data should never be fabricated by scientists. And um you know there are rare examples where such fake where fake data was was produced and the scientists were punished severely for that. So I would be really surprised if that happened here. Um I trust scientists unless proven differently. Um and so I would just assume this is the data they have especially because it's not very very impressive. Now it's you might say oh well maybe the original data was much more impressive. I would find it really hard to imagine that they would make the im images fuzzier than they actually are.
>> Okay. So what happens now? Is your team going to stay up all night and analyze what we just saw?
>> Yeah, I I have some collaborators that would look into the data. I hope we will have access to that data uh and analyze it, see what kind of information we can get from it. But as I said at the beginning, I don't expect big news from that because the quality of the data doesn't look impressive to me. uh it will just be marginal to what we already know and really it's really the coming weeks I think where we will get new insights to to Atlas.
>> AI we always appreciate you. Thank you so much for um uh staying on with us and taking so many of our viewers questions from YouTube uh and for analyzing all that we just heard whether it was impressive or not.
>> Thanks for having me. I will always tell you what I think and uh with me what you see is what you get.
>> All right, let's leave it there, man.
Thank you so much for your time.
Appreciate it. Go ahead and bring in Harvard professor Avi Lobo. We have waited to be able to talk to you about this threeey atlas. And finally, we get some images from NASA. So, they say they are um opening a window into other solar systems. What was your reaction to what we just saw and heard?
Well, uh, there wasn't much news, I must say. Um, an hour before that press conference, I was asked by a reporter, what do I expect? And I said, I don't expect big news and NASA will repeat the official mantra that Frii Atlas is a natural comet and that they were unable to process the data until now because of the government shutdown. And probably the high-rise image will show a fuzzy ball of light like the Hubble image.
But I hoped to be surprised and I was not.
>> Oh man.
>> Uh but we did see a new data uh but nothing major in terms of the insights as to the nature of the object. Um there was data presented in addition to the one we already saw from the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Web Space Telescopes, Ferex, Swift test. I mean these are things we already witnessed.
There was some new data from the Lucy spacecraft, Maven uh SOHO high-rise. Um but again all these uh images were uh fuzzy. Uh there was no new insight offered by them and of course one would like to analyze those images. I mean they detected for example hydrogen from the spectrograph on maven. Uh so that of course says say says something about the the production rate of water because hydrogen comes from the breakup of water molecules and one can also infer that from the detection of uh hydroxil radicals, oxygen and hydrogen molecules that were detected actually um a few weeks ago uh by a radio telescope um mircat and It was detected again today.
There was a report from early November.
So I mean these are details that can be combined to infer production rate of water. We already know that carbon dioxide based on web telescope data was uh much more abundant than than than water. And so um the main questions we have about three atlas were not really addressed.
And the I would say that the data that was released over the past week or two after 3i Atlas came out of the direction of the sun. So we can observe it from Earth. That data is far more interesting. It shows jets, multiple jets going in different directions. And we're yet to see a big telescope imaging those jets. So far we saw amateur astronomers telescopes. Uh and so these images are intriguing.
uh the question of whether three atlas for example shows non- gravitational acceleration you know that's still being calculated debated uh that's another important insight about what happened to it when it came closest to the sun uh and of course as it gets closest to earth that will be on December 19th we'll have the best opportunity to use the hundreds of telescopes on earth and the Hubble and web space telescope s to get our best data on it. So, as far as I can tell, in terms of scientific output, there wasn't much uh offered >> in this press conference.
>> Plenty of questions for you. Uh one question that was just posed. Uh can you respond to their conversation about or their comments about it putting off nickel?
>> Well, uh so indeed that's one of the anomalies. I listed 12 anomalies about 3i Atlas. One of them is that you know the the detection of nickel was not supplemented by significant detection of iron. And in fact the first detection of nickel had no iron just an upper limit.
Uh very extreme ratio of nickel to iron that was never seen before in any comet.
Uh and obviously that's puzzling because nickel and iron are produced in exploding stars in similar amounts. And in fact for the solar composition there is more iron than nickel. So um we've never seen something like that. And you know when we uh for example find nickel from the impact of asteroids that are nickel rich they are also iron rich that there is never a situation where it's mostly nickel and very little iron except for industrial production of of alloys nickel alloys that are used for aerospace applications. So I mean they are always seeing whatever data we get as a a signature of an unusual comet.
Okay. So no matter how unusual the chemical composition would be, they would say, well, it came from a different environment. What do you expect? Uh the main, you know, the main anomaly that I find the extremely puzzling and they didn't even mention it is the size of the object. So I based on on the data that we have by now which uh is not just the web telescope data that they mentioned but uh other details. It looks like the object is at least 5 kilometers in diameter and maybe more.
And that means that it's at least a thousand times more massive than the previous comet. We know it's it was a comet Borisov discovered in 2019 and and moreover it's about a million times more massive than Amu Mua the first interstellar object. So when you see the third object being a thousand times more massive than the second and a million times more massive than the first it should raise a a big question. How is that possible?
because we should have found a thousand borisovs and a million omuam muas before finding one giant icy iceberg of the type that we found.
So, uh this should be really a puzzle and they should have mentioned it as a puzzle but they don't even mention that.
And the second is why do we have it in the plane of the planets? I mean obviously it's a great fortune that all the NASA observatories can look at it and they mentioned the fact that they look at it. They're really happy about the fact that they could monitor it all the time. But the fact that fact that they can monitor it all the time is really a miracle cuz only one in 500 incoming objects would be aligned so well with the ecliptic plane of the planets that allows all these NASA assets to be used.
>> So they don't comment about that. So all the things that appear extremely rare you know like all these features maybe they say something that is not well understood. So NASA, you know, these administrators basically are trying to portray an image of an unusual comet because it came from an in a a different environment. But um they don't attend to the fact that there are extremely rare properties of this comet that should that should puzzle them that. So I think the appropriate response to that would be you know there there are very puzzling facts about this. It it's maybe it's a indeed it's a natural comet but it means that we don't understand the factories that make such things because if we get a such a big package that happens to be aligned with the plane of the planets and shows much more nickel than iron you know maybe there is something really fundamentally wrong with the way we think about the origin of these things they don't even bring this up I mean I don't have an issue with them claiming it it must be natural but even if it's natural it seems to me that the main message is that you know we don't fully we are missing something.
We don't know how such an object is generated created.
>> If it's not uh again we've we've got a ton of questions for you on on YouTube and I know you're um your time is tight today. Um Adam says if they're billions of years old like you said wouldn't they have discovered a more efficient form of transportation rather than using a comet-like spacecraft? Wouldn't they have discovered faster than light travel, teleportation, wormhole, dimensional travel, etc. after billions of years? Uh, that's why I'm skeptical on this whole object being of alien origin.
>> Well, this is a strange question because whoever asked this question is skeptical because of ideas that have nothing to do with what we know about physics. We don't know if it's possible to travel faster than light. In fact, Einstein's theory of relativity says it's not. So the question the person who asks the question says why couldn't they discover faster than light travel? Well because as far as we know it doesn't exist.
Okay. And the second is wormholes. As far as we know it doesn't exist. We don't know how to make a wormhole. We don't know if it's possible to make a wormhole because then you would build a time machine that would violate the laws of physics. So as far as we know such things do not exist. So you can't ask a question saying they would have discovered it because we don't know that such things exist. Okay. Now you can ask why wasn't it moving faster than 10 the minus 4 of the speed of light? You know in principle that's a good question. But if they were to move faster, we would never discover an object moving close to the speed of light because the telescopes would not record an object.
They would basically get a a smearing of the light from the object along a a line and it would be very dim. And the observers would dismiss it as an object.
So an object moving too fast, much faster than the typical speed of uh asteroids, comets in our solar system would be discarded. We will not hear about it. The observers will never report about it. So when you ask why don't we see things moving faster is because of a selection effect. Our observations are not tuned to detect such objects.
>> Okay. So uh according to Rizzle he says according to the trajectory it entered our solar system where did three eye atlas come from?
>> We don't know where it came from because that depends on the duration of the journey and we have no no clock on it to tell us how long the journey was. Uh the only thing we have is that it moves at a high speed when it entered the solar system relative to the local population of stars. So the claim is well maybe it came from an old star because old stars are kicked around and they reach higher speeds. But the problem with that proposition and I wrote a paper related to that is that there is a caveat because you could imagine a parent star that is moving slowly and then the ejection speed from that parent star was large.
So we don't know if the ejection speed was large or the original host star was moving fast. And therefore we can't tell the age. There is no way for us to tell the age of the object unless we assume that the object acquired or inherited the original speed of its parent star which is an assumption. We don't know if it's true or not because we don't know what the ejection mechanism was to and where did this object come from within the the vicinity of that star.
>> Isaac asked why do we have virtually no highresolution images of the details in the surface of the moon and Mars? Don't we have the right people to clear that data?
Oh, we do have images of the surface of the moon and Mars, but the when you say not enough resolution, uh that is dictated by the aperture of the cameras that were used. So the there is the Mars or orbiter that is actually gave us detailed images of Mars. There was a lunar orbiter that gave us detailed images of the moon. But we can do much better and in the future hopefully there would be missions that would map those surfaces to much greater details and uh moreover as we go to these places we could map it from up close.
>> Robert says why do the jets and plumes that appear to be coming from three Atlas seem to not be influenced by a 16-hour rotation?
>> That's an excellent question. I asked the same. That's one of my anomalies.
you would expect um uh you know given the typical um uh speed of the material in those jets you would expect to see wiggles uh that we don't see and um somehow the the jets are uh tightly cumated. So this is an important puzzle that needs to be addressed. Again, um you know, we we gain new knowledge in science out of asking questions or paying attention to anomalies. We we don't learn much by saying, "Oh, it's a comet. Comets do strange things and therefore we shouldn't worry about it." That's not the way we learn something new.
>> Lots of people bringing up how long it took them to release this data. Um this one says, "Why would NASA have a big event to release a picture of a simple rock? And with almost 50 days without releasing anything, why should we believe them? They are known to alter their images all the time. Um, bring Smart back. That's what they'd say.
>> Well, uh, I wouldn't necessarily suggest that they modify the images, but uh, you know, NASA is a big bureaucratic organization and a bureaucracy rules. Uh so if there is a government shutdown they may have given instructions not to release any data related to triatlas because they want to they want it to be processed through the headquarters. Uh they didn't uh do the same about other data. For example the high-rise um camera was taking images of Mars and releasing them you know a day later. Um, you can look at the high-rise website and you will see images rel that were released during the the shutdown. No problem at all. However, the three the the image of 3i Atlas was uh waiting for 45 days before we got to see it and it wasn't particularly revealing anything, you know, insightful about the nature of the object. So I I do think that um it's just the the NASA bureaucracy that set some rule about FA Atlatas. They wanted to have uh the the data publicly available after you know the the administrators have a chance to review it and I don't see anything beyond that.
It's just the bureaucracy uh taking hostage the uh dissemination of scientific information. Uh, of course, if it was an academic institution where there is no uh threat from from shutdown and even if there was a a university that was shut down, the scientists would still process it at their home and release the data immediately to the public, you know. So, it's a very different mentality. But, but in a government organization, the employees are not allowed to do anything to overrule what the administration tells them. even if uh they can easily process the data.
>> I'm going to try to get to two or three more questions. This one says, "Ai, do you think the 1977 signal could have been from three Atlas as it is reported to have come from the same general direction?"
>> Yeah, that's an excellent question again related to one of the anomalies in my list of 12 on my you can check my um latest essay on medium.com where I discuss all 12. Um so I actually encouraged the radio observers to look at threeas to check if there there is any radio transmission and today there was a report from Mircat the radio observatory uh there and again it's discussed in my essay today and they put an upper limit at a particular range of frequencies radio frequencies uh they observed it on November uh 5th and so the limit is just applicable to that particular date and over some range of frequencies and uh during that time they were able to set an upper limit on the power transmitted that as being less than that of a cell phone. So you can say there was no cell phone on November 5th uh transmitting anything from 3i Atlas.
>> Okay. Um Dr. lobe. If ThreeI Atlas were to change course or if it sent out smaller spacecraft or fragments of itself, how long would it take to arrive to Earth? Thank you for all that you do.
Thank you. So, if it changed course at roughly the same speed, not making it much faster. Um, then it would take a couple of months or so, a few months depending on exactly the details. Uh, and in fact, that was worked out in a paper that I co-authored.
um at in the middle of July that was published by now in a peer-review journal uh along with u Adam Hibbert and Adam Croll we considered the possibility that 3i Atlas is technological spacecraft and asked what kind of a velocity shift does it need to have in order to reach earth at a particular date and you can look at our plots and you will see for any target date there is a different velocity shift that it needs to acquire at an earlier time and and so we give all kinds of scenarios for that.
>> How will we know that the images are authentic and not doctorred?
>> We will never know that uh because we don't have access to the instruments and the flow of data. But we have to trust NASA scientists and you know science is based on trust. As you can tell these days, if you go online, you would see a lot of fake data, misinformation. You can't trust people. But there is a code of honor in science that uh data should never be fabricated by scientists. And um you know there are rare examples where such fake where fake data was was produced and the scientists were punished severely for that. So I would be really surprised if that happened here. Um I trust scientists unless proven differently. Um and so I would just assume this is the data they have especially because it's not very very impressive. Now it's you might say oh well maybe the original data was much more impressive. I would find it really hard to imagine that they would make the im images fuzzier than they actually are.
>> Okay. So what happens now? Is your team going to stay up all night and analyze what we just saw?
>> Yeah, I I have some collaborators that would look into the data.
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