Astronomers are closely monitoring the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, which is moving through the solar system at a speed of more than 200 thousand km/h and will fly past Mars in the near future. It is only the third interstellar object discovered in the Solar System after Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov, reports Futurism.
Most scientists consider it to be a comet, but Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb suggests that 3I/ATLAS may be much more massive and larger than previous estimates, and does not rule out the possibility of an alien spacecraft.
Research suggests that 3I/ATLAS is an interstellar comet that arrived from another region of the Milky Way. Its age is estimated at more than 7 billion years, which makes it older than the Sun. It also turned out that it contains much more carbon dioxide than expected. Despite this, the object still retains many mysteries, and scientists continue to observe it.
New calculations show that the mass of 3I/ATLAS may exceed 33 billion tons, and the size of the core is more than 5 km. This is significantly larger than the interstellar objects Oumuamua (about 400 m) and 2I/Borisov (about 1 km). The astrophysicist emphasizes that the trajectory of the comet’s flight is suspiciously close to Jupiter, Mars and Venus, which does not exclude the version of its artificial origin.
In just over a week, 3I/ATLAS will fly past Mars at a distance of just a few million kilometers. Loeb emphasizes that this trajectory looks very unusual, and calls for the HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to be used to determine the actual size and mass of the object and find out whether it is a comet or something else.
