3I⧸Atlas： The Increasingly Weird Interstellar Visitor
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
114.05317
Summary
In this episode, we talk about the mysterious visitor that has entered our solar system, 3i Atlas, and what it could be doing here on Earth. It's a weird thing to think about, but maybe it's not so weird after all.
Transcript
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So it's come to my attention that a surprising number of you haven't been
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paying attention to the interstellar visitor that's entered our solar system,
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3i Atlas. Maybe it's nothing. Could be nothing. It's a very weird and interesting
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nothing, even if it is just a nothing. But in case it's something, I figured I'd give
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you folks a rundown of some of the weirder aspects of what this thing is. Now I should
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start off saying that most of this information that I'm going to be talking about comes from
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Professor Ari Avi Loeb of Harvard University. Link down to his article below. But a lot
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more has come out since that time. And the closer this thing gets, the weirder it gets.
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So let's talk about the 3i designation, 3i Atlas. Henceforth, I'm just going to be calling
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it Atlas, since that's its name. The 3i is the designation for third interstellar object.
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In other words, this is not something from the Oort cloud. This is not a regular returning
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meteor. This is something foreign. The first interstellar object was Oumuamua back in 2017.
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Now it came from the Vega system, or it came from the direction of Vega, more or less. All three of
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these objects, they're kind of from the same quadrant of the night sky, but they look like they're coming
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from very different places. Oumuamua was kind of weird. It was a weird, it was a cylindrical
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object. Not really what we were expecting. Not a typical rogue asteroid. Some people at the time
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were pointing out that something like this could be an interstellar probe, right? If you're going to
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scout out a system before you arrive, maybe toss one in a hyperbolic arc. Never gets too close to any
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of the planets, but you can take some pictures, kind of get a bird's eye view of what's going on there.
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Maybe. It was kind of weird. The second interstellar object was Borislav back in 2019, coming from
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Cassiopeia. By all indications, just a rogue asteroid. Nothing too weird about it, aside from the fact that
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it's interstellar, and if you're a big nerd, there's a lot that's interesting about it. But this third
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one, Atlas, from the Sagittarius constellation. Although currently, at the recording of this video,
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it's, you know, if you could see, you can't because it's too bright, but it's almost in, it's almost
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directly in between Venus and the Sun in the constellation of, uh, of Virgo.
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You know, I have a telescope. I should have gotten a picture of it back when it was visible,
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but it didn't even occur to me. And now it's, it's past the solar horizon where we can't see it
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anymore. Now, what's weird about this thing? Well, first of all, it's probably about 20 kilometers
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in diameter. And Umuamua was considered really weird because it was two kilometers, which is huge.
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For, to find one 20 kilometer, we should see about 1 million 2 kilometer or smaller interstellar
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objects. And we've only seen three. Three confirmed interstellar objects that we found. And one of
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them is a one in a million size. So that is, that is pretty weird.
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It's also approaching at only five degrees off of our ecliptic plane.
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Which that means, the planets all rotate about the Sun on the ecliptic plane. Now that, the solar
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ecliptic is not the same as the galactic ecliptic. If you look up in the night sky and you're away
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from city lights, you can make out the Milky Way. The, the Milky Way is our galaxy. It's the cluster of
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stars that make a line up through the sky. So our ecliptic is significantly different from that.
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And every solar system is going to have its own ecliptic. And this thing's, this thing's approaching
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at only five degrees off of ours. So of all the angles that could have come, it's, it's slicing
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the pie beautifully. It's, uh, another weird thing. Now this thing entered what you could
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call our, our solar systems territory 8,000 years ago. Right around when we started recording
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history as far as we know, according to current theories. Goblepe Tepe might disagree with that,
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but we'll go with the civilization started in 4,000 BC. Okay. That's, that's about when
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it entered our, our solar system, the outer limits of the Oort cloud, which is a hundred thousand
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AU away. Uh, the Oort cloud is 2000 to a hundred thousand AU. And I'm going to be a little bit
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fuzzy on this one, but that's about too lightly, too light years. It's close to that. It's about
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halfway to the next star. So maybe calling that our territory is a bit of an exaggeration,
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but this, this thing has been coming for a really long time, but we couldn't see it until the absolute
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last minute because it was coming from the galactic core, from, from the region of the galactic
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core. In fact, later estimates show that this thing might be billions of years old.
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This thing might be older than our solar system. It's a, not just a traveler from deep space. It's a
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traveler from deep time. At least if our reverse trajectories on it are correct.
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So yeah, we could have landed a probe on it if we had spotted it one year earlier,
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but we didn't. It's too late. There's not enough time to launch a probe to go look at the thing close
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up. It's just going to rocket through the system and we got to look at it with what we have.
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Next it's hitting perihelion, which is it's perihelion is the top of the arc when it's doing
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a, when it's going to orbit around the sun and then leave perihelion is happening opposite from us.
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So we won't be able to see what happens at perihelion, which is, this is where we start
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getting into the really crazy parts. Okay. It's called a reverse Operth maneuver. Did I say that
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right? Yeah. It's at perihelion when you're in a, when you're in a gravitational well, you're going
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like this. If you want to orbit, that's the ideal place to hit your rockets to slow down.
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And they would need a delta V of 20 kilometers a second to do that, to slow down and get into
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orbit of earth or Jupiter about 20 kilometers a second, which we can't survive 20 kilometers
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a second of delta V, but we can build things that do 20 kilometers a second. Missile rockets
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do that. Intercontinental ballistic missiles do that. So that's totally feasible technology.
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What else? It, um, if it were to launch, if it were to launch a probe at Pluto, Venus, Mars,
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or Jupiter, five meters, no, sorry, five, five kilometers a second of delta V, which is again,
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something we can accomplish. Then there's the distance there. It's coming by Pluto, Venus,
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Mars, and Jupiter. Super close. Okay. Uh, Pluto, one, uh, 5.1 AU. I should clarify an astrononic,
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an astronomical unit is the distance, the average distance from earth to the sun. So it's about
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seven light minutes. Uh, Pluto, it's coming within 5.1 AU. Venus, it's buzzing it by 0.65 AU.
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Mars is 0.19 AU. So it's, it went super close by Mars. We'll get the Mars rover actually got pictures
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of it and Jupiter 0.36. And just to give you an idea of scale, Jupiter is 5 AU from the sun. So
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five times as far as we are. And the beginning of the Oort cloud is 2,000 AU.
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Now there was some, there was some discussion from, uh, Professor Loeb that it might be a solar sail.
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The thing that we're looking at could be a solar sail, which would be the ideal way to slow down,
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slow down and then come into orbit of earth or Jupiter.
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I mean, if you needed some hydrogen, Jupiter would be a good place to set up a base. Who knows?
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I think that's, uh, that theory has been debunked because, well, here's another really weird thing
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about it. So first of all, it started outgassing CO2. First, there was one plume and then there
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were plumes on both sides. After that, it started outgassing cyanide, which is why it's green right
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now. And yet the outgassing has not affected its velocity. So if it was a solar sail, it should have
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been slowing down. I don't believe it has been slowing down. Even though these things usually do
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slow down when they start outgassing. So either there's something else accelerating it or it's
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incredibly massive. And the, what little outgassing there is, isn't enough to slow it down.
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I mentioned also that the Mars probe, the Mars rover managed to take some photos of it.
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Now there's two cameras on the Mars rover. One is, one is designed for looking at space. The other
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there isn't. They only published the ones that weren't designed for looking at space. So we've got a
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streak in the sky is all that we have of it. They've had the other photos for weeks and they haven't
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published them. The only photos we have have been where it's a blip in the distance with maybe a halo
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around it and maybe a couple of plumes from the outgassing, which is outgassing is when an object
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hits the solar wind, it heats it up and frozen, frozen things that we call gases like CO2
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supplement. And they, they spray off. They go from solid to gas.
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And there's finally two, two last things that are really, really weird.
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I'm sure that most of you know about SETI, but I'll cover it briefly. The search for extraterrestrial
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intelligence. SETI is a giant radar telescope scanning the heavens for anything weird, anything
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noticeable. Prime numbers in sequence, for example. And the wow signal was back in 1977, I think.
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They detected a sudden burst of radio frequency. And the guy that was checking the report the next
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day wrote wow next to it. So that's the name of the wow signal, because it was like, whoa, that was
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something. But what was it? The cynical view would say it was probably a spy satellite. American, Russian,
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the radio telescope just happened to catch one of our own spy satellites that the government won't admit
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to. However, this wow signal came from the course that Atlas was on. And there have been other reports
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by amateur astronomers that they've been detecting bursts of radio information from this thing.
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Some of them to go, some of them going so far as saying they are detecting repeating patterns of prime
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numbers. The reason that's significant is that repeating patterns of prime numbers don't appear in nature. It's
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something a mathematically aware species would create to signal its intention to communicate.
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And this thing has basically disappeared. It's off our sensors right now. You know, some of the more advanced
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satellites can still track it, but you can't see it with a telescope anymore, because it's too close to
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the sun. It drops below the horizon before the sun does. At least up where I'm living. I'm not such an expert
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of astronomy that I could say the same for where you are.
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And it's going to disappear until late December.
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And if it's coming to Earth, if it's doing a hard break on the other side,
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NASA's claiming they haven't published the photos because the government's shut down.
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Other people are worried about Project Bluebeam.
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After all, that's a phrase invented by the CIA.
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unless if it warped here and put on a cloaking device,