Interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS: alien craft or just a weird comet?
When the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS swept through our solar system, Harvard's Avi Loeb flagged 'anomalies' he said could hint at alien technology. Most astronomers said it was simply an unusual comet.
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Loeb catalogues anomalies — a retrograde path hugging the ecliptic, extreme polarization, a nickel-rich coma, close passes by several planets — and argues we shouldn't rule out a technological origin.
The scientific consensus — and eventually Loeb himself — concluded 3I/ATLAS is 'most likely natural': a large interstellar comet of ice, CO2 and dust with unusual but explicable traits.
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