Tag: space

Harvard Astrophysicist Fans Alien Speculation After Detecting Odd Energy Signature on Interstellar Object

Astronomers detected the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS on July 1, 2025, using the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System telescope in Chile.

This marks the third confirmed interstellar visitor to our solar system, following ‘Oumuamua in 2017 and Borisov in 2019. NASA has classified it as a comet, estimating its size at 10 to 24 kilometers in diameter.

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has analyzed images showing an unusual glow at the object’s front rather than a trailing tail typical of comets.

He argues this brightness cannot result from reflected sunlight or standard outgassing of volatiles like water or carbon dioxide.

Loeb’s calculations indicate the luminosity reaches gigawatt levels, which he attributes to a possible internal power source.

Loeb has ruled out natural explanations such as a primordial black hole, which would produce negligible energy, or frictional heating from interstellar medium due to insufficient density.

He also dismisses a supernova radioactive fragment as statistically improbable. Instead, he proposes nuclear power as the most feasible compact source for the observed energy output.

In a paper co-authored with Adam Hibberd and Adam Crowl, Loeb suggests 3I/ATLAS could be an artificial spacecraft, potentially accumulating interstellar dust that emits forward under nuclear propulsion.

The object travels at approximately 210,000 kilometers per hour, the fastest recorded for a solar system visitor.

Spectral data show no cometary gases, and some observations lack a clear tail, though image smearing from motion complicates analysis.

The object’s trajectory originates from the Milky Way’s thick disk, possibly making it up to 7 billion years old, older than our solar system.

It follows a retrograde orbit aligned within 5 degrees of the ecliptic plane, passing close to Venus at 0.65 astronomical units, Mars at 0.19 AU, and Jupiter at 0.36 AU. Loeb calculates the probability of such alignments at 0.005 percent for random arrivals.

Loeb notes the perihelion on October 29, 2025, occurs opposite Earth relative to the Sun, at about 130 million miles away, potentially shielding it from detailed Earth-based observation.

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US Space Command Prepares For Satellite Vs. Satellite Combat

Late last year, an American military satellite and a French counterpart carried out a delicate orbital maneuver that signals a new phase in U.S. space operations. The two conducted a rendezvous and proximity operation (RPO) near an undisclosed foreign satellite (likely Russian), testing the ability to approach, inspect, and potentially manipulate another nation’s asset.

According to General Stephen Whiting, head of U.S. Space Command, the exercise demonstrated close coordination with France and reflected growing threats in orbit. “The French have talked about Russian maneuvers [near French satellites] over the years,” Gen. Whiting said. “And so…we demonstrated that we could both maneuver satellites near each other and near other countries’ satellites in a way that signaled our ability to operate well together.”

The success of the exercise, the first of its kind between the U.S. and a country outside the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, has prompted plans to repeat it later this year, according to The Economist.

Space Command, re-established in 2019 during President Donald Trump’s first term, has largely focused until now on building its headquarters and expanding staff. Gen. Whiting says that phase is over. “We now have a combatant command focused on war fighting in space,” he said.

Two developments are driving that shift:

  • Rising reliance on satellites for military operations. Gen. Whiting noted that America’s strike on Iran in June was “space enabled.”
  • Expanding threats from China and Russia. Since 2015, Chinese satellite launches have increased eightfold, and Beijing’s capabilities now surpass Russia’s, U.S. officials say. China, Russia, and India have all tested destructive anti-satellite weapons, and Washington accuses Moscow of developing an orbital nuclear weapon capable of disabling thousands of low-Earth orbit satellites.

Guess we don’t have space lasers after all?

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Mysterious Object Hurtling Toward Us From Beyond Solar System Appears to Be Emitting Its Own Light, Scientists Find

Last month, astronomers made an exciting discovery, observing an interstellar object — only the third ever observed — hurtling toward the center of the solar system.

The object, dubbed 3I/ATLAS, has caught the attention of Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who has a long track record of making controversial predictions about previous interstellar objects being relics from an extraterrestrial civilization.

While there’s been a growing consensus among astronomers that the latest object is a comet, Loeb has continued to entertain the idea that it may have been sent to us by an intelligent species from outside of the solar system — and he’s far from backing down.

In a blog post over the weekend, Loeb pointed to observations by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which showed a “glow of light, likely from a coma, ahead of the motion of 3I/ATLAS towards the Sun.”

A coma is the hazy and luminous cloud that surrounds the nucleus of a comet.

However, there’s “no evidence for a bright cometary tail in the opposite direction,” he wrote, with scientists suggesting it was evidence that dust was evaporating from the object’s Sun-facing side.

The observations led Loeb and his colleagues to an intriguing, albeit far-fetched possibility: is the mysterious space object generating “its own light?”

After deliberations with his colleague and Harvard astrophysicist Eric Keto, Loeb suggested that the “simplest interpretation” of 3I/ATLAS’ observed “steep brightness profile” is that its nucleus “produces most of the light.”

That would also mean that its actual size is much smaller than currently thought, roughly in line with the size of the first two interstellar objects we’ve observed, ‘Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov.

The Harvard astronomer suggested two possibilities: either 3I/ATLAS is naturally emitting radiation because its a “rare fragment from the core of a nearby supernova that is rich in radioactive material” — or it’s a “spacecraft powered by nuclear energy, and the dust emitted from its frontal surface might be from dirt that accumulated on its surface during its interstellar travel.”

Loeb deemed the former explanation “highly unlikely,” and the latter as requiring “better evidence to be viable.”

Loeb previously argued that the object’s unusual trajectory — which includes suspiciously close flybys of both Earth and Jupiter — and its lack of a visible tail both undermine the theory that it’s a comet.

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Pentagon effectively confirms ‘Golden Dome’ will breach Outer Space Treaty

On January 27, US President Donald Trump announced that the construction of the “state-of-the-art ‘Iron Dome’ missile defense shield” will begin “immediately” and will be made “right here in the USA 100%”. Since then, apart from a name change to avoid confusion with a homonymous Israeli system, there’s been little concrete information on the project. However, last week, the Pentagon presented more details about the upcoming “Golden Dome”, revealing that it will be a four-layer missile defense system and that it will also include a space-based component (the other three are ground-based, including eleven short-range batteries planned for deployment in the continental US, Alaska and Hawaii). Reuters cited a presentation of the project, titled “Go Fast, Think Big!”, shown in Huntsville, Alabama, last week to around 3,000 representatives of the American Military Industrial Complex (MIC).

The revelation didn’t really show much more than what was already known about the US strategic missile defenses. The slides revealed there would be early warning satellites for detecting missile launches, tracking and “boost-phase interception”. The “upper layer” would be composed of the Next Generation Interceptors (NGI), Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) and “Aegis” systems, with a new missile field “likely in the Midwest”. This would be followed by the “under layer” composed of “Patriot” systems, new radars and a “common launcher for current and future interceptors”. The space-based “boost-phase interception” capability is particularly curious. Although the slides didn’t really reveal how this would be accomplished, common sense implies that this is either deliberate disinformation (like the SDI was) or the Pentagon is actively pursuing space-based weapons.

Reuters noted that “one surprise was a new large missile field – seemingly in the Midwest according to a map contained in the presentation – for Next Generation Interceptors (NGI) which are made by Lockheed Martin” and “would be a part of the ‘upper layer’ alongside Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) and ‘Aegis’ systems which Lockheed also makes”. The NGI is supposed to be the next iteration of GBI (Ground-Based Interceptors), which is part of the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD). This system is a nationwide network of radars, interceptors and other assets that the US planned for decades, even unilaterally withdrawing from the 1972 ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) Treaty back in 2002, so it could pursue the project. This arms control agreement served to prevent the US and USSR/Russia from being incentivized to endlessly enlarge their thermonuclear arsenals by limiting the number of deployed ABM systems.

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New Details Emerge About Golden Dome’s Four-Layer Missile Defense Shield

The “Hemispheric Defense” theme is gaining momentum with new details emerging that the Golden Dome missile defense system will comprise of four layers: one space-based and three ground-based, including 11 short-range batteries positioned across the continental U.S., Alaska, and Hawaii. 

Reuters cited a U.S. government slide presentation on the project, titled “Go Fast, Think Big!”, which was presented to 3,000 defense contractors in Huntsville, Alabama, last week. Think of the Golden Dome as Israel’s Iron Dome on serious steroids, given its complexity and scale. 

According to the slides, the Golden Dome’s missile defense shield architecture calls for:

  • Space layer: satellites for missile warning, tracking, and boost-phase interception.
  • Upper layer: Next Generation Interceptors (NGI), THAAD, and Aegis systems — with a new missile field likely in the Midwest.
  • Under layer: Patriot systems, new radars, and a common launcher for current and future interceptors.

Reuters noted:

One surprise was a new large missile field – seemingly in the Midwest according to a map contained in the presentation – for Next Generation Interceptors (NGI) which are made by Lockheed Martin (LMT.N), opens new tab and would be a part of the “upper layer” alongside Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) Aegis systems which Lockheed also makes.

NGI is the modernized missile for the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) network of radars, interceptors and other equipment – currently the primary missile defense shield to protect the United States from intercontinental ballistic missiles from rogue states.

The U.S. operates GMD launch sites in southern California and Alaska. This plan would add a third site in the Midwest to counter additional threats.

The Pentagon pointed out challenges such as communication latency across the kill chain (a step-by-step sequence of actions needed to find, target, and destroy a threat). Major defense contractors on the project include Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX, and Boeing; SpaceX was absent from the latest plans. 

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Trump signs order to ease commercial spaceflight regulations

US President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday that he claimed would ease regulations that govern commercial rocket launches.

The order directs the US transportation secretary to eliminate or expedite environmental reviews for launch licenses given by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

“Inefficient permitting processes discourage investment and innovation, limiting the ability of US companies to lead in global space markets,” the executive order reads.

It also calls for the cancellation of “outdated, redundant or overly restrictive rules for launch and reentry vehicles,” according to a statement released by the White House.

Could the move benefit Elon Musk?

Trump’s latest executive order also states that “inefficient” permitting processes “discourage investment and innovation,” which in turn limits US companies’ ability to lead in global space markets.

The move could benefit private space companies such as SpaceX, the company owned by former Trump advisor Elon Musk, despite the two falling out publicly in recent months.

The company — which dominates the global private space launches market — plans missions to the Moon and Mars using its Starship rockets, which saw a series of setbackslastly in June as a routine test ended up in an explosion.

Environment groups slam executive order

Environmental groups have criticized Trump’s moves to deregulate commercial spaceflight.

“This reckless order puts people and wildlife at risk from private companies launching giant rockets that often explode and wreak devastation on surrounding areas,” Jared Margolis of the US-based nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity said in a statement.

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Something Massive Could Still Be Hiding in The Shadows of Our Solar System

Is there a massive undiscovered planet on the outer reaches of the Solar System? The idea has been around since before the discovery of Pluto in the 1930s.

Labelled as planet X, prominent astronomers had put it forward as an explanation for Uranus‘s orbit, which drifts from the path of orbital motion that physics would expect it to follow. The gravitational pull of an undiscovered planet, several times larger than Earth, was seen as a possible reason for the discrepancy.

That mystery was ultimately explained by a recalculation of Neptune’s mass in the 1990s, but then a new theory of a potential planet nine was put forward in 2016 by astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown at Caltech (the California Institute of Technology).

Their theory relates to the Kuiper Belt, a giant belt of dwarf planets, asteroids and other matter that lies beyond Neptune (and includes Pluto). Many Kuiper Belt objects – also referred to as trans-Neptunian objects – have been discovered orbiting the Sun, but like Uranus they don’t do so in a continuous expected direction.

Batygin and Brown argued that something with a large gravitational pull must be affecting their orbit, and proposed planet nine as a potential explanation.

This would be comparable to what happens with our own Moon. It orbits the Sun every 365.25 days, in line with what you would expect in view of their distance apart.

However, the Earth’s gravitational pull is such that the Moon also orbits the planet every 27 days. From the point of view of an outside observer, the Moon moves in a spiralling motion as a result. Similarly, many objects in the Kuiper Belt show signs of their orbits being affected by more than just the Sun’s gravity.

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The military’s squad of satellite trackers is now routinely going on alert

If it seems like there’s a satellite launch almost every day, the numbers will back you up.

The US Space Force’s Mission Delta 2 is a unit that reports to Space Operations Command, with the job of sorting out the nearly 50,000 trackable objects humans have launched into orbit.

Dozens of satellites are being launched each week, primarily by SpaceX to continue deploying the Starlink broadband network. The US military has advance notice of these launches—most of them originate from Space Force property—and knows exactly where they’re going and what they’re doing.

That’s usually not the case when China or Russia (and occasionally Iran or North Korea) launches something into orbit. With rare exceptions, like human spaceflight missions, Chinese and Russian officials don’t publish any specifics about what their rockets are carrying or what altitude they’re going to.

That creates a problem for military operators tasked with monitoring traffic in orbit and breeds anxiety among US forces responsible for making sure potential adversaries don’t gain an edge in space. Will this launch deploy something that can destroy or disable a US satellite? Will this new satellite have a new capability to surveil allied forces on the ground or at sea?

Of course, this is precisely the point of keeping launch details under wraps. The US government doesn’t publish orbital data on its most sensitive satellites, such as spy craft collecting intelligence on foreign governments.

But you can’t hide in low-Earth orbit, a region extending hundreds of miles into space. Col. Raj Agrawal, who commanded Mission Delta 2 until earlier this month, knows this all too well. Agrawal handed over command to Col. Barry Croker as planned after a two-year tour of duty at Mission Delta 2.

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Space-Based Missile Interceptors For Golden Dome Being Tested By Northrop

Northrop Grumman is conducting ground-based testing related to space-based interceptors as part of a competition for that segment of the Trump administration’s Golden Dome missile defense initiative. Interceptors deployed in orbit are currently billed as a critical component of the overall Golden Dome plan, but actually fielding this capability presents significant technical challenges.

Kathy Warden, Northrop Grumman’s CEO, highlighted the company’s work on space-based interceptors, as well as broader business opportunities stemming from Golden Dome, during a quarterly earnings call today. Golden Dome is presently envisioned as a multi-part anti-missile architecture incorporating a swath of existing and future capabilities in space and within the Earth’s atmosphere, which will start entering into operational service by 2028. Golden Dome was originally dubbed Iron Dome before the name was changed earlier this year. It is also now being managed by an office that reports directly to the deputy secretary of defense.

“As we look to Golden Dome for America, we see Northrop Grumman playing a crucial role in supporting the administration’s goal to move with speed and have initial operating capability in place within the next few years,” Warden said today. “This includes current products that can be brought to bear, like IBCS [Integrated Battle Command System], G/ATOR [AN/TPS-80 Ground/Air Task Oriented Radar], Triton [drones], and programs in our restricted portfolio, just to name a few. It will also include new innovation, like space-based interceptors, which we’re testing now.”

“These are ground-based tests today, and we are in competition, obviously, so not a lot of detail that I can provide here,” Warden added. “It is the capability that we believe can be accelerated and into the time frame that the administration is looking for.”

Warden declined to respond directly to a question about how the space-based interceptors Northrop Grumman is developing now will actually defeat their targets. TWZ has reached out to the company for additional information.

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Is the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Alien Technology?

Today I co-authored an intriguing new paper with the brilliant collaborators Adam Hibberd and Adam Crowl from the Initiative for Interstellar Studies in London, UK. The paper is accessible here.

One of the solutions to Enrico Fermi’s question about extraterrestrials: “where is everybody?” is offered by the dark forest hypothesis, popularized by Cixin Liu’s science fiction novel “The Dark Forest.” This hypothesis proposes that our cosmic neighborhood is dangerous, filled with intelligent civilizations that are hostile and silent to avoid detection by potential predators. In this context, the silence in searches for radio signals by the SETI community is not caused by the lack of extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations, but is instead a consequence of them fearing mutual destruction.

Our paper explores the possibility that the recently discovered interstellar object, 3I/ATLAS, may provide evidence in support of the dark forest hypothesis. This new interstellar interloper has displayed a number of anomalous characteristics, some of which were summarized in an essay that I wrote shortly after its discovery. In particular:

1. The retrograde orbital plane (defined by the orbital angular momentum vector) of 3I/ATLAS around the Sun lies within 5 degrees of that of Earth — the so-called ecliptic plane. The likelihood for that coincidence out of all random orientations is 0.2%.

2. As I showed in a recent paper, the brightness of 3I/ATLAS implies an object that is ~20 kilometers in diameter (for a typical albedo of ~5%), too large for an interstellar asteroid. We should have detected a million objects below the ~100-meters scale of the first reported interstellar object 1I/`Oumuamua for each ~20-kilometer object.

3. No spectral features of cometary gas are found in spectroscopic observations of 3I/ATLAS. The detected reddening of reflected sunlight could originate from the surface of the object. Related data can be found here and here. The fuzz observed around 3I/ATLAS (see images here, here and here) is inconclusive given the motion of the object and the inevitable smearing of its image over the exposure time.

4. For its orbital parameters, 3I/ATLAS is synchronized to approach unusually close to Venus (0.65au where 1au is the Earth-Sun separation), Mars (0.19au) and Jupiter (0.36au), with a cumulative probability of 0.005% relative to orbits with the same orbital parameters but a random arrival time.

5. 3I/ATLAS achieves perihelion on the opposite side of the Sun relative to Earth. This could be intentional to avoid detailed observations from Earth-based telescopes when the object is brightest or when gadgets are sent to Earth from that hidden vantage point. The retrograde trajectory at a perihelion speed of 68 kilometers per second, opposite to the direction of motion of the Earth around the Sun at 30 kilometers per second, makes the velocity difference between Earth and 3I/ATLAS 98 kilometers per second. It is therefore impractical for earthlings to land on 3I/ATLAS at closest approach by boarding chemical rockets, since our best rockets reach at most a third of that speed.

6. The optimal point for a reverse Solar Oberth maneuver to become bound to the Sun is at perihelion. In an Oberth maneuver, the thrust of a spacecraft is applied at its maximum orbital speed, namely at periapsis, so as to maximize the resulting change in kinetic energy. This applies both to accelerating to achieve Solar System escape, or alternatively to slow down from a high speed (a `reverse Oberth maneuver’) in order to break, stay bound to the Sun and potentially visit a planet like Earth. It is this optimal breaking point for 3I/ATLAS that is obscured from our view by the Sun.

7. The direction from where 3I/ATLAS is coming is oriented towards the bright Milky-Way center, where crowding by background stars made its detection difficult prior to July 2025. Figures 1 and 2 in our paper show that if astronomers were to detect 3I/ATLAS more than a year earlier, then we would have had an opportunity to launch a spacecraft that could have intercepted 3I/ATLAS along its path. By now, such an interception is not feasible with chemical rockets.

8. The velocity thrusts needed for launches of gadgets out of 3I/ATLAS to intercept Venus, Mars, or Jupiter are smaller than 5 kilometers per second, achievable by intercontinental ballistic missiles.

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