Speaker 1: Imagine this. It's a cold routine night up in Chile
Rio Hurtado. You're an astronomer sitting in this big, quiet
dome doing the work right, tracking space rocks, making sure
everything adds up. It's important work, but maybe you know,
a bit repetitive sometimes.
Speaker 2: Oh definitely, it's meticulous, checking data from the minor planet center,
verifying orbits. It's the groundwork for everything else. You're basically
confirming physics night after night.
Speaker 1: Exactly, confirming Keppler Newton, making sure everything's playing by the rules.
And then suddenly a number flashes up. Designation three A
eightis And it's not just a little off, it's laughing
at the rules. You check the velocity, the orbit path,
you think, okay, censer glitch system ror.
Speaker 2: Standard chicks, Yeah, recalibrate everyone.
Speaker 1: The data just sits there staring back at you, and
in that moment, for that one person, everything they thought
they knew about our solar system's boundaries just change.
Speaker 2: And that's really what we're diving into today. We've looked
at a whole stack of sources, observational data, the chemical
analysis from well the best telescopes we have Hubble JWST
exactly and the trajectory modeling all focused on this one
object three itls, it came from outside our solar system,
and pretty much every bit of data we have says
it's breaking the mold. It's challenging how we even define
comet or asteroid.
Speaker 1: The first thing that hit everyone was just the raw speed,
the sheer velocity.
Speaker 2: It's hard to even wrap your head around it. Fifty
eight kilometers per second relative to the Sun.
Speaker 1: That's what about one hundred and thirty thousand.
Speaker 2: Miles an hour roughly. Yeah, just incredibly fast. Think about it.
You could whip around the Earth in like eleven minutes
at that speed.
Speaker 1: Or get to the Moon in under two hours.
Speaker 2: It's nuts. Our sources are clear. This is hands down
the fastest visitor we've ever clocked coming through our solar system.
Speaker 1: And that speed, that crazy speed, immediately points to something
called orbital eccentricity.
Speaker 2: Right Hcisely, eccentricity basically measures how stretched out an orbit is.
Zero is a perfect circle. One is a parabola. That
means it's just barely hanging on by gravity.
Speaker 1: So anything actually orbiting our part of the family, so
to speak, has to be less than one.
Speaker 2: Less than one that's the rule. That's the definition of
being gravitationally bound to our Sun.
Speaker 1: So what was the number for three I tail, Well,
this is the kicker.
Speaker 2: The first calculations came back with an eccentricity.
Speaker 1: Over six six, not like one point one or one
point two, No.
Speaker 2: No, six, which means its path isn't just unbound, it's
violently hyperbolic. It's moving way, way too fast to ever
be captured by the Sun's gravity.
Speaker 1: So conclusion number one right off the bat. It's interstellar,
an intruder.
Speaker 2: Undeniably. It didn't form here. It's come from somewhere else,
probably traveling for million, maybe billions of.
Speaker 1: Years, maybe getting gravitational nudges from other stars along the way,
like a cosmic pinball.
Speaker 2: Could be slang shot it across the galaxy. Yeah, and
it just happens to be passing through our neighborhood now
a direct link to the wider fosmos showing up on
our doorstep.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we know it's from out there, but out
there is well huge. Figuring out where it came from
that's the next challenge, right, and Matthew Hopkins team tackled this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's way harder than just measuring speed. You're
not just tracing it back out of our solar system.
You need to trace it back through the galaxy.
Speaker 1: Which means accounting for everything pretty much.
Speaker 2: Yeah, billions of stars pulling on it, giant clouds of
gas and dust, to the way the galaxy itself rotates,
Different parts move at different speeds. They had to run
these massive computer simulations called n body.
Speaker 1: Simulations, simulating cosmic history basically.
Speaker 2: Essentially, yeah, running the clock backwards for millions of years,
to see where this thing's path originated.
Speaker 1: And what did they find? Did it come from like
a nearby star cluster?
Speaker 2: Nope, something much more interesting. The simulation showed it came
from a completely different part of the Milky Ways structure.
See our sun lives in what we call the thin disk.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's like our local neighborhood, flat relatively young stars.
Speaker 2: Exactly younger stars, more heavy elements, all rotating in a
pretty neat flat plane, but three I atlas its trajectory
points back to the thick disk.
Speaker 1: The thick disk. Okay, let's pause there. What's the difference
If the thin disc is the main city the thick
disc is, It's.
Speaker 2: Like the older, more spread out suburbs maybe or maybe
the historical foundations of the city. It's a puffier region
above and below the thin disk, and it's full of
much older stars, older how we call them population two stars.
They formed much earlier in the galaxy's history, like ten
twelve billion years ago. They have fewer heavy elements because
they formed before generations of stars had cooked up things
like carbon and iron.
Speaker 1: So we're talking about stars from a fundamentally different, earlier
era of the universe.
Speaker 2: We really are. And if three ialsauce originated there around
one of those ancient stars, well the agestimate is just staggering.
Speaker 1: How old are we talking?
Speaker 2: Hopkins team calculated it could be around ten billion years old?
Speaker 1: Ten billion. Well, our whole solar system is only what
four and a half billion years old exactly.
Speaker 2: This thing might be more than twice as old as
the Earth as the Sun. It likely formed around a
star that burned out and died billions of years ago.
Speaker 1: A star that maybe doesn't even exist anymore.
Speaker 2: Very possibly, it's potentially the oldest comet or comet like
object we've ever seen. A time capsule from the dawn
of the Milky Way.
Speaker 1: Wow. So You've got this piece of literal ancient history,
formed when the galaxy was just getting started.
Speaker 2: Carrying material from ten billion years ago.
Speaker 1: And it just shows up now in our present.
Speaker 2: That's profound, it really is. You can see why scientists
immediately knew this wasn't just another rock. It's a messenger
from the deep past.
Speaker 1: Okay, so it's incredibly old from this ancient part of
the galaxy, But what is it actually made of? Getting
a look at it must have been tough, moving that
fast and being so far away.
Speaker 2: Extremely tough. David Hewett's team used the Hubble Space Telescope. First.
Imagine trying to track a bird flying really fast, but
you're using super powerful binoculars from say here to the moon.
Kind of the scale of the challenge.
Speaker 1: Keeping it in frame, getting enough.
Speaker 2: Light right precision pointing was key, but Hubble managed it.
And what they saw wasn't just a dot. It was fuzzy.
It had this distinct tear drop shape.
Speaker 1: Ah, so that means it's not just a dead rock,
it's active like a comet.
Speaker 2: Exactly that tear dropped was the coma gas and dust
being released as ice is on the surface turned directly
into gas sublimation.
Speaker 1: And that tells us it has ice. But could they
tell how big the actual solid bit the nucleus was.
Speaker 2: Based on the size of that desk cloud, they estimated
the nucleus is probably around five kilometers across, so maybe
a couple of miles wide. Decent size but not enormous.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we know it's icy releasing gas, but to
really understand its history, you need the chemistry, right, the ingredient.
Speaker 2: That's where the Games web Space Telescope comes in. JWST.
Martin Cordiner led that observation.
Speaker 1: And JWST is special because it sees.
Speaker 2: An infrared light precisely. It's like having super powered infrared vision.
It doesn't just take pictures.
Speaker 1: It does spectroscopy, which is like reading a barcode.
Speaker 2: That's a great analogy. Starlight passes through the gas coming
off three iAtlas. Molecules in that gas absorb very specific wavelengths,
specific colors of infrared light. JWST sees which colors are missing.
Speaker 1: And the missing colors tell you what molecules are there.
Like scanning the barcode tells you the product exactly.
Speaker 2: It reveals the chemical fingerprint of the gas.
Speaker 1: So what fingerprint did JWST find for three iAtlas? What
was the big surprise?
Speaker 2: The big surprise, and it was a huge one, was
carbon dioxide CO two. The gas was overwhelmingly dominated by
CO two.
Speaker 1: Wait, hay On, don't. Commets in our solar system usually
spew out water vapor like steam Haley's comet, hailbop. They're
famous for their water.
Speaker 2: That's the standard. Yes, and that's what makes three II
tell us so weird and why it supports the age theory.
Ce COO two ice turns to gas sublimates at much
colder temperatures than water ice. Ok. Commets the belong to
our solar system have swung by the sun many, many
times over billions of years. Each time they get closer,
they get baked.
Speaker 1: Right. They lose the easy to boil off stuff.
Speaker 2: First, exactly, The volatile stuff like CO two gets driven
off early, leaving them richer in the harder to sublimate
water ice. They're kind of pre cooked chemically altered by
solar radiation. But three ioplis it was the opposite. The
ratio was something like eight times more CO two being
released than water vapor. That's one of the highest CO
two to water ratios ever seen in any comic.
Speaker 1: Wow. So the implication is.
Speaker 2: The implication is stark. This object has likely never been
close to a star before, or at least not close
enough to get significantly warmed up. It's chemically pristine, untouched.
Speaker 1: That ten billion year old time capsule idea. The chemistry
backs it up. It's been kept in a deep freeze.
Speaker 2: Perfectly preserved in the cold of interstellar space, carrying its
original ingredients from the dawn of the galaxy until now.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we've got this ancient, chemically pristine object moving
at incredible speed. That's already a lot. But now now
we get to the part that seems to just break physics.
Its movement, right, we.
Speaker 2: Know it's releasing huge amounts of gas, predominantly CO two.
Speaker 1: We saw that with JWST and basic physics Newton's third
law action reaction. If you're shooting gas out one way, you.
Speaker 2: Could be pushed the other way. It's simple rocket science.
Really comments do this all the time when they outgas.
Those jets act like tiny thrusters.
Speaker 1: Giving them a little nudge right, pushing them slightly off
the path gravity alone would dictate. We call it non
gravitational acceleration exactly.
Speaker 2: Every comment we've ever studied shows this effect. You can
measure it, you can predict it based on how much
gas is coming off.
Speaker 1: So with three I A lists pouring out record amounts
of CO two, the rocket effect should have been noticeable.
Speaker 2: It should have been significant. Models predicted that by early
September based on the observed outgasing, it should have deviated
measurably from its purely gravitational trajectory.
Speaker 1: And what did the actual observations show? Did it deviate?
Speaker 2: Not even a tiny bit. Observations confirm it was sticking
perfectly precisely to the path calculated using only gravity. Despite
pumping out all that gas, its acceleration was effectively zero.
Speaker 1: Hold on, how is that possible? You have a force
acting on it, this escaping gas, but no change in motion.
That doesn't work.
Speaker 2: It flies in the face of fundamental physics. It left
scientists completely baffled, scrambling for an explanation, and basically they
came up with two possibilities, both of which sound pretty impossible.
Speaker 1: Okay, what's possibility Number one?
Speaker 2: Mass? Maybe the object is just incredibly incredibly massive, so
massive that the push from the escaping gas is like
a fly bumping into a battleship. It just doesn't register.
Speaker 1: How massive are we talking?
Speaker 2: The calculation suggested to resist that outgassing force, it would
need a mass over thirty three billion metric tons.
Speaker 1: Thirty three billion tons. Didn't we say it was only
about five kilometers wide?
Speaker 2: Exactly? That's the problem. If you pack thirty three billion
tons into a five kilometer sphere.
Speaker 1: The density would be insane. What are we talking about
leg iron?
Speaker 2: Yeah, the density would have to be around eight or
nine grams per cubic centimeter. That's denser than iron. Comets
are supposed to be fluffy, icy dirt balls, maybe half
the density of water, sometimes less, not solid metal cannon balls.
Speaker 1: So explanation one is it's a ten billion year old,
chemically pristine, super dense metal object pretending to be a comet,
which seems unlikely, highly unlikely.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, especially given the observed outcasting, which implies ices.
So that leads to possibility number two. Well, if it's
not impossibly dense, if it's made in normal comet stuff,
then the only way it could be firing off all
that gas and not moving off course is if something
is actively counteracting that force.
Speaker 1: You mean like thrusters, artificial stabilization.
Speaker 2: That's the implication, some form of active station keeping thrusters
firing the opposite direction to perfectly cancel out the natural
push from the CO two jets, keeping it precisely on
its gravitational path.
Speaker 1: We're actually having a scientific discussion about an interstellar object
potentially using thrust.
Speaker 2: The physics paradox forces that consideration. When you eliminate the impossible,
the insane density, whatever remains, however improbable, Well, you have
to look at it, and the idea of artificial course
correction is now genuinely on the table. It's unprecedented.
Speaker 1: Okay, this is getting wild, impossibly old, weird chemistry, defying physics,
and now gets even stranger when we connect it to
something else entirely Avi Lob's research right.
Speaker 2: Now, Yeah, Professor Avi Loh from Harvard. He took that
precisely measured trajectory, the one it's sticking to despite the outgassing,
and traced it backwards.
Speaker 1: Way way back beyond the thick discord, far beyond.
Speaker 2: He projected its path across the sky to where it
would have appeared to come from DP space, and it
pointed to a very specific patch of sky in the
constellation Sagittarius.
Speaker 1: Sagittarius, why does that ring a belt?
Speaker 2: Because Loeb realized immediately that region of Sagittarius is the
same direction the famous Wilba W signal came from back
in nineteen seventy seven.
Speaker 1: The WOW signal. Okay, quick refresher for everyone. August seventy seven,
Jerry Emmon looking at data from the Bigger radio telescope and.
Speaker 2: He sees this incredibly strong narrowband signal just spikes off
the chart. He circled it on the print out and
wrote wow W next to it.
Speaker 1: How strong was it?
Speaker 2: A thirty times stronger than the background cosmic noise. It
lasted for exactly seventy two seconds, tracking perfectly with the
Earth's rotation, suggesting an extraterrestrial origin, and crucially, the.
Speaker 1: Frequent spunting twenty megahertz the hydrogen line.
Speaker 2: Exactly the frequency scientist figured any intelligent life trying to
signal across the cosmos might use, because hydrogen is everywhere.
It's like the universal dialing tone.
Speaker 1: But it only lasted seventy two seconds and then gone,
never heard again in almost fifty years, still totally unexplained.
Speaker 2: Completely unexplained, and now he had this object three I
at lists as of fast has ever seen, the one
defining physics in its flight path lines up perfectly with
where that unique signal.
Speaker 1: Came from perfectly or is it just kind of close?
Speaker 2: Loeb calculated the alignment. They line up within nine degrees
of arc on the sky. The odds of that being
pure chance less than one percent, about point six percent probability.
Given how vast this guy is having the most mysterious
object we've ever seen track back to the source of
the most mysterious signal we've ever received. That's statistically mind boggling.
Speaker 1: It's hard to dismiss that as just coincidence, very hard.
Speaker 2: And then then there are the other reports, unconfirmed, we
should stress, but persistent from amateur radio astronomers.
Speaker 1: What did they claim to detect?
Speaker 2: Reports surfaced, particularly around early August, of detecting a very
brief signal of like eleven seconds long that seemed to
be coming from three eyeles, itself.
Speaker 1: A signal from the object. What kind of signal?
Speaker 2: The claim was that, when decoded, it wasn't random noise.
It was a repeating sequence of prime numbers two, three, five, seven,
eleven prime numbers.
Speaker 1: That's straight out of Carl Sagan. Isn't it the idea
that primes are a universal sign of intelligence because they
don't occur naturally exactly.
Speaker 2: They require math, they require thought. It's the perfect hello,
I'm intelligent message now again. And these are unconfirmed amateur reports.
NASA hasn't said anything, but multiple Ham radio operators have
reported detecting structured signals repeating roughly every twenty two minutes
from that area of the sky.
Speaker 1: So you've got the physics anomaly of the WLW signal
alignment these alleged prime number signals. It's not surprising the
conversation shifted.
Speaker 2: Is it not at all? And Avi Lobe, who used
to chair Harvard's astronomy department, He's not shying away from it.
He's treating three a AT lists as a serious candidate
for extraterrestrial technology.
Speaker 1: What's his project doing, the Galileo project.
Speaker 2: He's tasked his team. Their whole mission is the scientific
search for et tech to monitor three iatlists closely, not
just for gas and dust, but for any unusual activity,
oh like could it be a carrier? Could it release
smaller probes? He's openly talking about looking for many probes
that could potentially visit Earth. When a scientist of his
stature is publicly discussing that possibility linked to this specific object, well,
we're definitely off the standard map.
Speaker 1: Right, so the speculation is running high. And then came
this golden opportunity for a really good look. The Mars
fly by on October third.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was potentially game changing. Three I and lasts
passed about twenty nine million kilometers from Mars, which sounds far,
but it meant it was perfectly positioned for observation by
the fleet of orbiters we have there.
Speaker 1: We've got some serious hardware orbiting Mars.
Speaker 2: We do NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, mro ESA's Mars Express,
the xmr's Trace Gas Orbiter, all passed with advanced cameras
and sensors. It was a perfect chance to get a
clear picture, maybe resolve the nuclear shape, see the outgassing
jets or lack thereof.
Speaker 1: Everyone was waiting for these amazing images, and what did
we get.
Speaker 2: We got one image, a single, really low quality picture
taken by the Perseverance Rovers navigation camera.
Speaker 1: The navcam. Isn't that just for spotting rocks? So the
rover doesn't bump into them pretty much.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not designed for astronomy. And the image it
produced was this blurry, elongated streak.
Speaker 1: Which immediately blew up online right people calling it a
giant tic tac or a cylinder.
Speaker 2: The streak was about four pixels long, and people just
assumed that represented the actual shape and size, leading to
these conclusions of a massive fifty thousand kilometer long spaceship.
Speaker 1: But that interpretation didn't hold up, did it.
Speaker 2: Not? For a second. Experts including Lobe, pointed out the
obvious flaw at that distance. Each pixel in that nabcam
image covered a huge area, about twelve five hundred kilometers.
Speaker 1: So a four pixel streak doesn't mean it's fifty thousand
kilometers long.
Speaker 2: Absolutely not. If something that enormous had entered the Solar System,
we wouldn't need a rover's nabcam to see it would
be obvious.
Speaker 1: So what was the streak? Then?
Speaker 2: It was just motion blur, an artifact of the long exposure.
Because the object was so faint and moving relative to Mars,
the camera had to take multiple exposures over about ten
minutes and stack them together. The streak just shows the
object's movement during that time.
Speaker 1: So basically the worst possible image was released and it
just fueled wild speculation instead of providing clarity.
Speaker 2: Precisely, which leads to the really awkward question why only
that image? Where's the good stuff from.
Speaker 1: MRO, specifically the Mars Reconnaissance Warber Exactly.
Speaker 2: MRO has the high rise camera, high resolution imaging science experiment.
This thing can see features the size of a dinner
table on the Martian surface for MORBID, So.
Speaker 1: At twenty nine million kilometers it should have been able
to get a much better view of three.
Speaker 2: I at lists way better. Its resolution at that distance
would be about thirty kilometers per pixel, plenty good enough
to clearly see the five kilometer nucleus, maybe even see
its shape, see if it's tumbling, see where the jets are.
Speaker 1: And we know MRO is looking. It was tasked to
observe it, but nothing was released.
Speaker 2: Weeks went by nothing, which is highly unusual. Normally, Mars
orbiter images, especially of something this interesting, get processed and
released pretty quickly, sometimes within hours, usually within days.
Speaker 1: What was the official reason for the delay?
Speaker 2: They cited delays related to a potential US government shut
down impacting staffing and processing pipelines.
Speaker 1: Didn't they manage to process and release the low res
rover image during that same period.
Speaker 2: That's the inconsistency. Yeah, the explanation doesn't really track releasing
the terrible image while withholding the high quality data they
could actually answer key questions. It looks suspicious.
Speaker 1: It feels like information control. If you wanted to manage
the narrative with holding the clear evidence would be the
way to do it.
Speaker 2: It certainly raises that possibility. Whether intentional or just bureaucratic fumbling.
The effect was to keep the public in the dark
about what our best instruments actually saw during that crucial flyby.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the trajectory is weird. The lack of images
is weird. What about the light coming from it? You
mentioned it glowing green?
Speaker 2: Yeah, this was another strange development. Around early September, amateur astronomers,
particularly observers in the Southern hemisphere like Michael Jerger and
Gerald Raymond in Namibia started getting these really vivid photos
showing three IAD als with a distinct green glow.
Speaker 1: Okay, comments can glow green? Right, that's a known thing.
Speaker 2: It is. It happens when sunlight breaks down a specific
molecule containing two carbon atoms called diatomic carbon or C two.
That molecule fluoresces green.
Speaker 1: So that's the problem.
Speaker 2: The problem is, just weeks before these green photos started appearing,
one of the world's biggest telescopes, the Very Large Telescope
or VLT, had done a detailed chemical analysis, and the
VLT data indicated that three iidl loss was actually depleted
in these carbon chain molecules, including C two. It should
have been one of the least green comets ever seen.
Speaker 1: So it shouldn't have been glowing green at all.
Speaker 2: According to the VLT data, No, or at least not brightly.
So you have this direct contradiction. Sophisticated analysis says no green,
but amateur photos clearly show green glow.
Speaker 1: How do you explain that. Did its chemistry suddenly change?
Speaker 2: That would be incredibly rapid and hard to explain. Yea,
or maybe there's some other process causing the green light
that we don't understand yet for this specific object. It's
another paradox.
Speaker 1: And it gets even weirder with time lapse photos.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Analyst named Stephan Burns did a deep dive into
some of those time lab sequences when he looked frame
by frame and had other observers review it. The suggestion was, well,
it didn't look like just one object.
Speaker 1: What did it look like?
Speaker 2: The analysis described potentially multiple objects, several fast moving points
of light traveling together near the main fuzzy spot, and
maybe even more bizarrely, the reported seeing a brief, separate
flash of green light that seemed offset from the main
object's core.
Speaker 1: A separate green flash and multiple points of light that
sounds less like a comet breaking up and more like
formation flying.
Speaker 2: It definitely pushes the boundaries of interpretation. Yeah, is it
just fragments or something more structured? And then on top
of the color mystery, there's the way it scatters light.
Speaker 1: You mentioned polarization data. How does that work?
Speaker 2: Polarization tells you how light waves are oriented after they
bounce off something. Think about polarized sunglasses cutting glare. They
block light waves vibrating in certain directions. By measuring the
pollarization of sunlight reflecting off the comets, dust scientists can
figure out stuff about the dust particles themselves, their size, shape,
maybe even.
Speaker 1: Texture like a fingerprint for the dust structure.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and Zurigrace team analyze the polarization from three iAtlas.
What they found was, in their words, an exceptionally deep
and narrow negative polarization branch.
Speaker 1: Okay, translate that for us. What does deep and narrow
negative polarization mean.
Speaker 2: It means the dust is scattering light in a way
that is completely unique. We've never seen anything like it before,
not from any common in our solar system, not from
any asteroid, not even from Umuwua or Borso of the
other interstellar visitors.
Speaker 1: So the structure of the dust itself is anomalous.
Speaker 2: It seems to be. The data suggests the particles might
be incredibly porous, maybe very fluffy aggregates, or perhaps even
something with a complex, maybe even fibrous structure. Whatever it is,
it doesn't match anything we have in our celestial catalog.
It's another piece of evidence screaming that this object is
fundamentally different.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's recap where we are. We have three I atlas,
fastest ever, maybe ten billion years old. Weird co two
chemistry defies physics by not accelerating tracks back to the
WIW signal source. Maybe sent prime numbers glows green when
it shouldn't, scatters light like nothing else, and the best
pictures are missing. It's a lot.
Speaker 2: It's an unprecedented pile up of anomalies, and now we're
heading towards a critical point in its journey and a
critical blind spot for us.
Speaker 1: You're talking about pery Helian, its closest approach to the Sun.
Speaker 2: Exactly around October thirtieth, it starts its swing around the Sun,
and because of the orbital mechanics from our viewpoint on Earth,
it's going to pass almost directly behind the Sun.
Speaker 1: Meaning we lose sight of it completely for about three weeks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the Sun's glare will make it totally impossible to
see with any ground based telescope. A total observational blackout
during its closest, most intense encounter with.
Speaker 1: The Sun and Perihelium is dangerous for comments. Isn't it
the heat, the gravity?
Speaker 2: It's brutal, extreme radiation, huge temperature swings, intense gravitational ties
pulling on it. It's the ultimate stress test. Many comments
don't survive, like.
Speaker 1: Commet Ice in a few years back, went behind the
Sun and just never came out exactly.
Speaker 2: It disintegrated. Others like Comet Lovejoy survived but were visibly changed,
maybe fragmented. So the natural expectation or fear is that
three i outlasts might break apart during pery helium.
Speaker 1: But given everything else, there's another fear. Isn't there a
more speculative one.
Speaker 2: There is, and it's a big But if this object
is artificial, then maybe peri helium isn't a danger but
an opportunity. Maybe the intense energy isn't destructive but activating.
Speaker 1: Activating like using the Sun's energy.
Speaker 2: For something, or simply using the cover of the blackout
period to change state, deploy something, or maneuver in ways
that would be obvious if we could see it. The
timing is just convenient if you were inclined towards suspicion.
Speaker 1: An object with all these weird properties disappears behind the
sun right when data is being withheld. It does sound
almost scripted, and.
Speaker 2: Some observers have noted, though it's purely external speculation that
this scenario, object approaches, disappears, potentially transforms while hidden echoes
elements of certain conspiracy theories about staged events. We're not
endorsing that, just noting the parallel being drawn because of
the timing and lack.
Speaker 1: Of data, So the key date becomes when it re
emerges from behind the sun. When will that be.
Speaker 2: It should start becoming visible again to ground telescopes sometime
in December twenty twenty five. But there's another data point.
ESA's Juice spacecraft, which is out near Jupiter, might get
a look slightly earlier, maybe late November as it comes
out of the glare.
Speaker 1: Okay, so Gus, you might see it first. When do
we get that data?
Speaker 2: And here's another eyebrow raiser. ADASA has stated that the
JZAC data from that period won't be processed and released
until February twenty twenty six.
Speaker 1: February, that's like three months after it's collected and after
it's already visible from Earth again.
Speaker 2: Exactly, which has led to cynical interpretations like that's three
months for them to decide what they want to tell us.
It feeds the narrative of potential information management.
Speaker 1: So December twenty twenty five becomes this real focal point.
What will we see when it comes back into view
for everyone?
Speaker 2: Some researchers are calling this the potential controlled revelation moment.
Think about it. The public has been hearing about this object,
hearing the anomalies, hearing top scientists like Loeb discuss alien
tech possibilities. We've been sort of prepped.
Speaker 1: So if something really weird emerges in December.
Speaker 2: The authorities, NASA, ESA, they could just act surprised. Wow,
look what happened during Perry Healion. We've never seen a
comet do that before. It could be a way to
gently introduce the reality of extraterrestrial technology without causing mass
panic or the alternative. Or the alternative is complete denial,
no matter what it looks like when it comes back,
even if it looks like a fleet of ships, they
can just insist, Nope, still just a really really weird comet.
Fascinating natural phenomenon. And if they're still sitting on the
hires Mars data, who could definitively.
Speaker 1: Argue soh December twenty twenty five could be huge, or
it could be nothing.
Speaker 2: It genuinely feels like it could be one of the
most significant months in human history, or it could just
fizzle out and three eyead lays remains an intriguing scientific puzzle.
But the fact that we're even having this conversation globally
shows how much this object has shaken things up. Hashtag
tag outright track.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's just quickly run through the anomally list one
last time because it's staggering. Three ilis fastest object ever.
Speaker 2: Check estimated ten billion years old from the galaxy's ancient.
Speaker 1: Thick disc Check pristine chemistry dominated by CO two, meaning
it likely never saw a star up close before.
Speaker 2: Check defies Newton's laws by outgassing like crazy but not
accelerating at all. Check that forces the impossible density versus
artificial station keeping debate.
Speaker 1: Its path points directly back to the source of the
unexplained nineteen seventy seven WOW signal, with tiny odds of
being Chance.
Speaker 2: Check unconfirmed reports of prime number signals detected from it.
Speaker 1: Check the high resolution images from the Mars flyby are
mysteriously missing, while a misleading low res image was released.
Speaker 2: Check it glows green when it's known chemistry says it shouldn't,
and it scatters light in a way unlike any known
natural object. Double check.
Speaker 1: I mean, when you list it all out like that,
it's overwhelming.
Speaker 2: It really is this single visitor, this piece of interstellar debris,
or something else. It forces a fundamental question on us.
Speaker 1: Is it just the universe throwing us the weirdest curveball imaginable,
the most extreme rule breaking natural object we've ever encountered.
Speaker 2: Is it something else? Is it technology, something that has
somehow survived for ten billion years, crossing the vastness of
the galaxy to arrive here now?
Speaker 1: And the answer might genuinely depend on what we see,
or perhaps more pointedly, what we are allowed to see,
when it comes back out from behind the Sun in December.
Speaker 2: It demands our attention. It forces us to think bigger,
to reconsider our assumptions about the universe, and maybe, just
maybe our solitude within it. December could be very interesting
In the eight