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In July 2025, astronomers spotted<\/a> a mysterious object screaming through the solar system from interstellar space.<\/p>\n The object, later dubbed 3I\/ATLAS, has been a fertile area of investigation for researchers curious about the composition its far-away point of origin. It\u2019s also generated plenty of eyebrow-raising speculation, with Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb meticulously cataloguing<\/a> its unusual properties to build a case<\/a> that it could have been an ancient alien relic<\/a> sent to us by an extraterrestrial civilization.<\/p>\n While the scientific community has overwhelmingly concluded it\u2019s a comet<\/a>, researchers wanted to find out for sure whether 3I\/ATLAS may have been an alien probe.<\/p>\n In a new paper<\/a> published in The Astronomical Journal, a team of scientists from the Search for Intelligent Life (SETI) Institute at Berkeley University and the alien-hunting astronomy project\u00a0Breakthrough Listen<\/a> scanned 3I\/ATLAS across a huge range of radio frequencies to see if it was emitting any artificial signatures.<\/p>\n Using the Allen Telescope Array near San Francisco, the team narrowed an original dataset of \u201cnearly 74 million narrowband hits in 7.25 hours of data\u201d down to roughly two million candidates by filtering out any radio-frequency interference (RFI), meaning electromagnetic radiation from human-caused sources such as communication equipment.<\/p>\n They then algorithmically filtered these for any outliers \u2014 potential signs of artificially strong radio emissions \u2014 to come up with 211 signals of interest. However, none of the 211 signals stood out as technological and all of them were \u201ceasily attributable to RFI,\u201d according to the paper.<\/p>\n It\u2019s yet another nail in the coffin for the theory that 3I\/ATLAS was a piece of alien tech. Previously, Breakthrough Listen\u00a0had also pointed the Green Bank Telescope \u2014 the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world \u2014 at 3I\/ATLAS, and similarly failed to detect any \u201ccandidate signals<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, the process itself was worthwhile.<\/p>\n \u201cThe results from 3I\/ATLAS show how realistic it is to detect a signal with the technology we have today,\u201d said coauthor, Breakthrough Listen member, and Furman University physics professor Valeria Garcia Lopez in a statement<\/a>. \u201cThat is why it is important to keep searching for technosignatures, even from objects we might not expect to have signals.\u201d<\/p>\n And the fact of the matter is that it\u2019s not entirely unlikely that there are alien probes drifting through space. After all, we\u2019ve launched several of our own.<\/p>\n \u201cEventually, our own Voyager spacecraft will be extraterrestrial artifacts in other stellar systems,\u201d said lead author and SETI Institute researcher Sofia Sheikh in a statement. \u201cGiven that, it is important that we understand the natural distribution of interstellar objects so that we will be able to identify any anomalies that could one day be signs of an artificial interstellar object.\u201d<\/p>\n