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\t\t\t Anibal Martel\/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images\n\t<\/p>\n
After over a month of government shutdown, NASA finally released new images<\/a> of mysterious interstellar object 3I\/ATLAS on Wednesday.<\/p>\n During the livestreamed event, NASA brass took pains to \u201caddress the rumors,\u201d with associate administrator Amit Kshatriya vehemently denying a theory championed by Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb that we could be looking at an alien spacecraft coming to visit<\/a> from a different star system.<\/p>\n \u201cThis object is a comet,\u201d Kshatriya said. \u201cIt looks and behaves like a comet, and all evidence points towards it being a comet.\u201d<\/p>\n The announcement appears to have angered Loeb. In a blog post<\/a>, the astronomer criticized NASA for repeating the \u201cofficial mantra that 3I\/ATLAS is a natural comet,\u201d arguing that \u201cthere was no big news.\u201d<\/p>\n He quoted British author Arthur Conan Doyle\u2019s fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, that \u201cthere is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact\u201d \u2014 effectively accusing NASA of misleadingly and prematurely discrediting his far-fetched theory.<\/p>\n The tense back-and-forth highlights a fascinating discussion over what\u2019s deemed acceptable in scientific discourse \u2014 and what isn\u2019t. While Loeb maintains that we shouldn\u2019t discard the possibility that we could be looking at an alien spacecraft, NASA officials are clearly wary of adding any credence to the theory and are unwilling to entertain it.<\/p>\n NASA showed off an image of 3I\/ATLAS taken by the HiRISE camera attached to its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the release of which was delayed by the government shutdown. It shows a \u201cfuzzy white ball,\u201d per Kshatriya, contrasted against the blackness of outer space.<\/p>\n Loeb argued that the image, as well as ultraviolet readings from NASA\u2019s MAVEN spacecraft, only added \u201cslightly to what we already learned this summer\u201d through observations from NASA\u2019s Hubble and James Webb space telescopes<\/a>.<\/p>\n Instead, NASA \u201cshould have emphasized what we do not understand about 3I\/ATLAS rather than insist that it is a familiar comet from a new birth environment,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n Loeb has cataloged a dozen \u201canomalies\u201d<\/a> that he says could support the theory that 3I\/ATLAS an \u201calien mothership<\/a>,\u201d including its enormous suspected mass<\/a>, its highly improbable trajectory<\/a> that had it blazing past several inner solar system planets, and gigantic \u201ctightly-collimated jets\u201d<\/a> pointing towards and away from the Sun, as seen in recent observations by amateur astronomers<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIn case 3I\/ATLAS is a natural icy rock as they suggest, Mother Nature was kinder to NASA than expected from a random delivery of rocks by at least a factor of 100,000,\u201d Loeb wrote.<\/p>\n There\u2019s still time before 3I\/ATLAS leaves us for good. In December, the object is expected to make its closest pass to Earth, allowing us to once again point our ground- and space-based telescopes at it.<\/p>\n While NASA has cemented its stance on the matter, concluding that 3I\/ATLAS is a natural comet, Loeb isn\u2019t giving up. To him, it\u2019s a matter of keeping an open mind.<\/p>\n \u201cImaginative scientists master the humility to learn something new from anomalies rather than display the arrogance of expertise,\u201d he wrote in his latest blog post.<\/p>\n \u201cLife is worth living if we allow for the unexpected to surprise us,\u201d he added. \u201cBureaucrats or unimaginative scientists want us to believe in the expected. But the rest of us know that the best is yet to come.\u201d<\/p>\n