NASA Scientist Disputes Claim That Mysterious Object Headed Into Solar System Was Sent by Aliens

NASA has thrown cold water on Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb's theory that interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS was sent to us by an extraterrestrial civilization — a sobering albeit unsurprising conclusion that just might put the captivating hypothesis to rest once and for all.

In early July, astronomers first discovered the object, which was only the third interstellar visitor ever detected in the solar system.

Since then, Loeb has advanced the "tantalizing possibility" that 3I/ATLAS was "sent towards the inner solar system by design" and could even be releasing "mini-probes" to explore further.

That's despite a growing consensus that the object is a comet, a ball of ice and dust that offgases material as it screams closer to the Sun.

Loeb has already made waves in scientific circles for asserting that 'Oumuamua, the first interstellar object ever identified back in 2017, may have been sent to us by an alien civilization.

For his more recent claim, Loeb has pointed to 3I/ATLAS' unusual chemical makeup, its peculiar path taking it close to the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, and its enormous suspected size.

But as NASA's lead scientist for solar system small bodies, Tom Statler, told The Guardian that it's far more likely to be a comet.

"It looks like a comet," he said. "It does comet things. It very, very strongly resembles, in just about every way, the comets that we know."

"It's a comet," he concluded.

However, Statler conceded that 3I/ATLAS has "some interesting properties that are a little bit different from our solar system comets."

The NASA scientist explained that the way comets react once they're being hit by the Sun's radiation is "a bit unpredictable."

"So even in our solar system, comets can have a history of suddenly brightening if there’s, say, a particular pocket of ice that sublimates quickly and drives off a large amount of dust," he told the Guardian.

While we've only spotted three interstellar visitors so far, it's almost certain that 3I/ATLAS won't be the last.

"It’s not that they’re really anything new, but we’ve just recently had the ability to discover them," Statler told the paper. "This gives us a window we’ve never had before, directly into the composition of other solar systems."

Loeb himself has acknowledged that 3I/ATLAS may not be the technological remnant of an extraterrestrial civilization he's proposed.

"The simplest hypothesis is that 3I/ATLAS is a comet and we are missing the spectral features of its gaseous coma because of its large distance from Earth," he admitted in a July 12 blog post.

Nonetheless, the astrophysicist has argued that scientists everywhere should keep an open mind regardless.

"Whereas the dogmatist will shove anomalous data under the carpet of traditional thinking, an open-minded scientist will be thrilled to learn something new with an underlying sense of humility," he wrote in a recent post.

"Not only is nature more imaginative than we are, but it also does not care whether we figure it out," he added. "The insistence that everything in the sky is either icy rocks or human-made technologies will not rid us of cosmic neighbors, if they exist out there."

More on the object: The Mysterious Object Cruising Toward Mars Is Doing Something Very Peculiar