The plot of the movie Independence Day could soon become reality—as early as this November.
According to Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, a 20-kilometer-wide unidentified space object exhibits some alien-like attributes.
Even further, a paper co-authored by Loeb last month concluded that if the object were an alien vessel with “malign” intentions, then the consequences could be “dire for humanity.”
Loeb and his colleagues at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have written two papers about the object, which was first detected by a NASA-funded telescope in Chile on July 1.
On Thursday morning, Loeb joined CNN This Morning to discuss what NASA has labelled 3I/ATLAS.
The agency has identified the object as an “interstellar comet” on its website and said that it “poses no threat to Earth,” but Loeb cautioned against dismissing some of the object’s extraordinary characteristics.
“The brightness of the object implies a diameter of 20 kilometers. There’s not enough rocky material in interstellar space to deliver such a giant object,” Loeb said.
“It takes 10,000 years for that much mass to arrive to the inner part of the solar system.”
Another factor that the scientist pointed to that distinguishes 3I/Atlas from other interstellar objects (of which only two others have ever been detected) is its trajectory through the solar system.
“The trajectory of this object is very finely tuned. It lies in the plane of the orbits of the planets around the sun, to within five degrees. The chances of that to happen is one in 500.”
He went on to say that the chances of the object’s path past Jupiter, Mars, and Venus being random were in the range of one in 20,000.
people.com
