Scientists have discovered that the 3I/ATLAS — a Manhattan-sized interstellar object that potentially has alien tech — is much larger than previously thought, according to a new report.
First discovered by NASA on July 1, the cosmic anomaly has been under watch by Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb and his team as it shoots across the solar system. The object, which is believed to be a comet, reportedly has interstellar origins, making it the third ever object from beyond the solar system ever detected after ‘Oumuamua, which was discovered in 2017, and 2I/Borisov in 2019.
Now the team has gleaned some “sizable” new intel on the interstellar visitor, namely that the “mass of 3I/ATLAS must be bigger than 33 billion tons,” per a blog post by Loeb.
They arrived at this number by calculating the object’s trajectory to find that ATLAS’s “gravitational acceleration” is “smaller than 49 feet per day, squared,” Futurism reported.
This was then compared to how much mass it was shedding via gases and dust particles to determine the size.
Loeb and co. also found that the diameter of its solid-density nucleus must be larger than 3.1 miles — the upper limit of current projections that are based on observations by the Hubble Space Telescope.
This makes it larger than “three to five orders of magnitude” more massive than its predecessors, ‘Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov.
Hellbound and Down 