Kim Kardashian excitedly asked the NASA leader just before Halloween.
“Wait… what’s the gossip about 3I Atlas?!?!!!!!!!!????” she wrote on social platform X.
Kardashian was asking about a comet called 3I/ATLAS that is passing through our region of the universe.
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Sean Duffy, the acting administrator of NASA and a former reality TV star himself, responded with a sign of encouragement, like a high school science teacher.
“Great question!” he said, explaining that the “3I” indicates that it is the third known object to have come from outside our solar system.
He reassured her that regardless of what she had heard about the comet’s possible origins, there was no cause for alarm.
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“No aliens,” he said. “No threat to life here on Earth.”
This cluster of rock, dust and ice, and whether it was sent by some intelligent being, suddenly became an important topic in many people’s minds.
Kardashian asked about it. Joe Rogan also on his podcast. A large number of people have consulted Google about NASA’s planetary defenses.
Andrew Siemion is the principal investigator for Breakthrough Listen, which uses large radio telescopes to search for extraterrestrial communications. He said he was at an airport recently when someone, overhearing his conversation, “tapped me on the shoulder and asked, ‘Are you talking about 3I/ATLAS?’” He said yes.
“People are aware of it,” Siemion said, “and they’re very excited about it.”
This comet’s notoriety can be credited to Avi Loeb, a Harvard astrophysicist widely respected for his research into black holes, dark matter, and other topics in conventional science.
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But in recent years, he’s been speculating a lot about aliens as well.
Loeb has appeared on several news programs since July, when 3I/ATLAS was first detected by the University of Hawaii’s Asteroid Terrestrial Impact Alert System (ATLAS, hence the baptism in the comet’s name). He discussed the topic for a few hours with Rogan and produced a series of essays questioning whether the comet could be a Trojan horse sent by aliens to spy on Earth, or worse.
“Is 3I/ATLAS wearing a comet costume,” Loeb wrote recently, “or is it really an icy rock of natural origin?”
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He noted that on December 19, six days before Christmas, the comet will make its closest pass to Earth, about 170 million miles away. “Will 3I/ATLAS send mini-probes to Earth as Christmas presents for humanity?” he asked.
Loeb estimates the chances of an artificial origin for 3I/ATLAS between 30% and 40%. Their argument is based on seemingly unlikely coincidences and unusual features observed on the comet.
This interpretation contrasts sharply with that of many other scientists, who say they see no signs of anything unnatural.
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“The whole thing is tainted by this claim that it might be a spacecraft,” said David Jewitt, an astronomer at UCLA. “So I think in people’s minds, yes, it’s a spaceship.”
And, he added, when experts say it isn’t, many people think “they’re covering it up.”
Everything observed by ground- and space-based telescopes “fits with what we see in other comets,” Jewitt said. “It’s quite believable, but Avi systematically took these things and interpreted them differently, much to my disappointment.”
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Loeb insists he is open to changing his mind as more observations are made, but wants policymakers to take this seriously as a possible threat.
“What I’m saying is we should consider this possibility,” Loeb said in an interview.
Many people share Loeb’s willingness to consider this possibility, which combines an enduring philosophical question — “Are we alone in the universe?” — with conspiracy theories that experts and the government are hiding or ignoring the truth. (.)
Science communication experts like Dan Fagin, director of the Science, Health and Environmental Reporting program at New York University, say it’s not necessarily a bad thing for scientists to cover topics — like aliens — that fascinate many people.
“It is important to awaken scientific curiosity, including in people like Kim Kardashian,” said Fagin.
But, he added, “it is equally important, and perhaps even more important, to talk about probability in addition to possibility.”
Loeb admits that “30 to 40%” is an impression, not a scientific conclusion based on statistical data. “It wasn’t based on calculation,” he said, “because it’s impossible to make a calculation about it.”
For the most part, 3I/ATLAS looks and behaves like a comet, made of the same material as common comets in the solar system — water, dust, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. Hubble Space Telescope observations indicate it is at most 3.5 miles wide, and Jewitt said it could be considerably smaller, perhaps two-thirds of a mile.
The comet has unusual properties. When it was discovered, more than 400 million miles from the sun, 3I/ATLAS was already surrounded by a cloud of dust and gas. This differs from the typical dark and inert state of most comets at this distance.
Some of its chemical composition is unusual. It has much more carbon dioxide than most comets in the solar system, as well as high levels of nickel.
When 3I/ATLAS made its closest approach to the sun last month, it brightened considerably, and its color changed, taking on blue-green tones. Its trajectory is also not exactly what one would expect for something pulled solely by the sun’s gravity.
As soon as 3I/ATLAS was discovered, Loeb began to speculate about these peculiarities.
The non-gravitational force pushing the comet and the blue-green hue could be the firing of a rocket engine, he suggested. (Jets of gas rising from the surface could provide a similar propulsive effect, and the color change, which has been seen in other comets, could simply be the glow of molecules escaping the comet and excited by sunlight.)
Loeb also highlighted that 3I/ATLAS is traveling in almost the same plane as the orbits of the planets in our solar system. The solar system is tilted at a 60-degree angle to the disk of the Milky Way galaxy, and so the comet’s motion in the same plane as the planets could be another indicator that the trajectory is intentional, not random, he said.
But other astronomers say that what Loeb sees as intentional design is probably mere coincidence. They also say that an object that formed around another star and traveled through the Milky Way should look different.
“It came from outside our solar system, for God’s sake,” said Siemion.
In the coming weeks, the James Webb and Hubble telescopes will make more observations.
A new US-funded telescope in Chile, the Vera Rubin Observatory, will find many more interstellar objects in the coming years.
Kardashian has not publicly commented on whether Duffy, the leader of the government agency she says faked the moon landings, convinced her that 3I/ATLAS is not an invading alien spacecraft.
But Loeb boldly invited her to join his research team.
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