3I⧸Atlas： The Increasingly Weird Interstellar Visitor
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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,