Avi Loeb, the Baird Professor of Science and Institute director at Harvard University and the author of “Extraterrestrial” and “Interstellar,” has recently emerged as the most popular astrophysicist, followed by the lay. His views on 3I/ATLAS, ever since the ‘black swan event’ prediction for 29th October on the day of the comet’s perihelion, brought more limelight to the bizarreness of the brazen rock from beyond our home—the solar system.
In his recent Medium blog, Loeb draws attention to the human space probe sent in 1970, the Voyager-1, which reached interstellar space in 2012. He remarked that these technological objects should also be considered in the training data set while studying interstellar objects. He states
Most stars are billions of years older than the Sun, and during a billion years our Voyager spacecraft with its 1970s technologies can reach the opposite side of the Galactic disk. This implies that there was plenty of time for interstellar artifacts, potentially more advanced than Voyager or the Tesla Roadster car, to reach the Solar system from interstellar space. Would comet experts recognize these visitors as technological artifacts if their training data set includes only icy rocks?
Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has been relentlessly publishing his listicle of anomalies found while studying 3I/ATLAS, the third-ever interstellar interloper to bump into our cosmic neighborhood in the solar system.
Discovered on July 1, 2025, by the Chile-based Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), the comet also known as C/2025 N1 first alarmed researchers with its elliptical trajectory that is usually seen amongst planets like the Earth. Its anti-tail, which is a plume towards the sun, atypical of comets, also casts further aspersions on 3I/ATLAS being one. The chemical composition, with an abundance of more nickel than iron, led a handful to believe that the object indeed was a probe, although there hasn’t been conclusive proof of the same. Meanwhile, 3I/ATLAS’s alleged non-gravitational acceleration post-perihelion has divided the research community.
Even as stargazers continue to document the faintest, fuzziest glimpse of the comet, the world awaits NASA’s HiRISE images of 3I/ATLAS which were captured during its transit closest to Mars in early October.
See Also: 3I/ATLAS: Harvard Astrophysicist Avi Loeb Spots 12th Anomaly In The Interstellar Comet