More 3I/Atlas Weirdness

 

As if 3I/Atlas couldn't get any weirder! Back in July when the interstellar interloper was first discovered, there was a strong feeling of "promissory normality" in the astronomical community. The great hope for the skeptics was that the more we learned about 3I the more ordinary it would become. "Relax, chaps! It's just a rock." was a refrain I heard over and over again from people who were just guessing. They didn't know any more about the object than the rest of us. "But it will turn out to be a rock when we know more about it!" they insisted. They remind me of the scientists in the 70's who said near-death experiences would be explained as brain function in the future when we know more about the brain (and we're still waiting for that after half a century, see: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2023/06/afterlife-portal.html.). However, the opposite has happened. The more we learn about 3I the stranger and stranger it gets; see the background link below. The latest ingredient of strangeness was dropped into the mix yesterday, but it refers to a study that has been ongoing for a while, in fact the data was gathered soon after 3I's discovery. Two Russian researchers, Yuri Medvedev and Sergei Pavlov, have made the accouchement on The Astronomical Telegram, not to be confused with the social media app Telegram; as a few dishonest skeppers will no doubt attempt. This is a very old website, launched in 1997, to serve as a short-notice publication service for quickly disseminating information on new astronomical observations. The post reads: "We report the results of the analysis of the O-C distribution of positional observations (Δα, Δδ) for the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS (C/2025 N1) taken from MPC. A Lomb-Scargle periodogram was constructed based on the O-C values obtained for the moments when the comet's heliocentric distance became less than 4 AU. It was found that the (Δα·cosδ)2+Δδ2 values undergo variations with a statistically significant period of 4 hours. We also constructed a periodogram for 19 photometric observations obtained between July 4 and 6 from the paper (they provide a hyperlink). Values with the maximum aperture (m14) was used. The identified period coincided with the O-C period and is equal to 4 hours." This text might not mean much to you unless you are a trained astronomer, but there are some resources simplifying it; but not Prof. Avi Loeb yet, although I'm sure the good professor is onto this one like a dog with a bone. Source: https://www.astronomerstelegram.org/?read=17437.

What this is based on is an observation made at Cornell University reporting that 3I/Atlas was exhibiting some distinctly unusual celestial mechanics. It was undergoing periodic cycles of motion and brightness. The obvious mundane explanation for this would be rotation; in fact it was the very extreme levels of brightness changes indicating rotation that led to Avi claiming that 1I/'Oumuamua might not be a natural object. The problem is that 3I/Atlas' motion cycle runs about once every four hours and the brightness cycle every two; why are they not changing together. The motion alone would be difficult enough to explain, especially if the object turns out to be at its currently estimated minimum diameter of 5.6 kilometres, or bigger. Yet when you add in this regular pulse of light you get a genuine anomaly wrapped in an enigma. What's even more interesting is that this behaviour back in early July appears directly to contradict later observations that have also been proposed as evidence for a possibly non-human intelligent origin, see: https://avi-loeb.medium.com/news-on-3i-atlas-lack-of-non-gravitational-acceleration-implies-an-anomalously-massive-object-7ad320e69cef and the background link below. So did this early activity change as 3I closed in on the inner solar system? It looks like it did. If so, why? Nobody knows, but this feature has certainly never been discovered in any natural object ever seen in space. It seems unlikely that this is another outgassing effect too because it is too regular and, dare I say it, controlled. Outgassing acceleration, as I've detailed in the background, is random and transient, like a loose firework. We are faced with yet another true riddle; and I wonder what the answer is. This news raises another issue. Obviously science can be a slow and methodical process. Very often it is carried out by a large team in many different institutions who gather evidence and then talk amongst themselves about what it means. Then they have to arrange their thoughts into a coherent narrative that makes up a paper. This then has to be edited for publication; charts and illustrations have to be rendered. As we found out, the first JWST publication took over a fortnight. This new Russian one has taken over three months. This length of time could be for perfectly innocent reasons, but my naturally conspiratorial mind inevitably drifts to the question of why Medvedev and Pavlov have published now. By now I mean just after 3I/Atlas enters the visual baffles of the sun. Right now it is totally invisible to terrestrial telescopes and will remain that way for probably about a month and a half. Did they wait until 3I was out of sight to publish? Maybe they felt nervous about the implications of their findings and didn't want it launching a major scandal. By coming clean with 3I in solar conjunction nobody else can confirm or deny what they are saying for a long time. They have given themselves a breathing space. They could even be hoping the questions will be forgotten when the scientific news cycle moves on. I think this give us an insight into the scientific psychology and culture. Why should two proper scientists, being honest and using the proper methods, be frightened to theorize that they might have discovered aliens? The only answer has to be that there is some kind of sociological taboo related to it, despite all protestations to the contrary, see: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2021/08/skeptics-portal.html. Obviously there are exceptions who have the courage or foolhardiness to blurt it out and sod the consequences, like Prof. Loeb, but these are manifestly a rare breed. I wonder how many of his colleagues secretly agree with Avi, but they don't want to risk saying so. They want to avoid the aggro he's had to put up with. Either way, this impasse has an expiry date. 3I will burst out from behind the sun in mid-November to the gaping eyes of every astronomer on earth. If it's still acting weird then, or even more so, there will be no way to avoid facing up to those facts.
See here for background: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2025/07/interstellar-object-portal.html.