Speaker 1: Okay, just imagine this for a second. There's an object
up there racing through our Solar system, and it's not
just following the rules. It's not just you know, obeying
gravity like everything else from a planet down to a pebble.
It seems to be actively defying them.
Speaker 2: It really does. It's behaving erratically, it's accelerating without any
obvious push, and its appearance, it's just turning all the
physics we know about comments completely on its head.
Speaker 1: It's the kind of thing you'd expect in a movie, right,
a high drama sci fi.
Speaker 2: Crisis, exactly something scientists might have kicked around, as you know,
a purely theoretical problem. But this is happening. We're watching
it in real time.
Speaker 1: Welcome to thrilling Threads. This is where we take all
the sources you've given us, pull on those threads and
really unpack the essential knowledge you need to get up
to speed and fast.
Speaker 2: And today we want to go beyond just the dramatic headlines.
We want to really understand the physics, or I guess
more accurately, the failure of known physics that's surrounding this visitor.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, our focus today is on the interstellar object known
as three I Atlas, and we should probably clarify that
name right at the top, the three I prefix. That's important.
It tells you this is only the third confirmed interstellar
object we've ever seen passing through our Solar system.
Speaker 2: Right, it follows one Iumuurma, the cigar shaped one, and
then two ibores off which looked more like a traditional comment.
Speaker 1: And the fact that we're already on number three and
seeing them this quickly, it kind of suggests these visitors
might be a lot more common than we ever thought.
Speaker 2: Well, if the first two gave us hints of strangeness,
three I Atlas is delivering a full blown scientific mystery.
We're going to explore exactly why this object seems to
be defying the laws of physics, as it's well, as
it's apparently rushing towards our.
Speaker 1: Planet, and why that's triggered this constant monitoring from NASA,
from the European Space Agency, and even the UN's International
Asteroid Warning Network. I mean, they're all watching.
Speaker 2: The source material doesn't mince words. It's been called an
interstellar enigma, one that is bending the very rules of physics.
Speaker 1: So our mission today is to unpack the evidence behind
a claim that dramatic. We need to understand what happens
when the world space agencies all point their telescopes at
a single, profound mystery that is right now two hundred
and sixty nine million kilometers away from US. Okay, so
let's get into it. First. We have to talk about
the language being used, because it's pretty alarming. We're told
it's rushing towards our planet.
Speaker 2: That definitely creates a certain impression. Doesn't it a sense
of alarm?
Speaker 1: It does, But we need to clarify what rushing means here. Yes,
its speed is incredible, it's an interstellar object. But that
distance two hundred and sixty nine million kilometers, that's huge.
Speaker 2: It is so the urgency here. It's not about planetary defense.
It's about scientific discovery. The window to study this thing
is what's rushing by, and from.
Speaker 1: A physics perspective, it's the journey itself that's so strange.
The first big anomaly, and this is really the core
of it, is its acceleration.
Speaker 2: Yes, scientists are to put it mildly puzzled. Three I
Atlas is clearly speeding up. The acceleration doesn't seem to
be coming from solar pressure.
Speaker 1: And that's the standard explanation, right, Yeah, that's what should
be happening.
Speaker 2: It's the textbook driver for cometary accelerations, what we expect
to see every single time.
Speaker 1: Okay, hold on, let's really break that down for anyone
listening who might not be deep into commetary mechanics. Why
should solar pressure be the cause? What's the normal process here?
Speaker 2: It's a great question because it sets the baseline for
just how weird this is. So when a typical commet,
say from our own orc cloud, gets closer to the sun,
the heat from the Sun starts to vaporize its surface,
the ice, water, ice, frozen carbon dioxide. It turns directly
into a gas. Its process called sublimation. We call it
out gassing.
Speaker 1: So the Sun is basically a giant blow towards hitting
a snowball.
Speaker 2: That's a perfect analogy. And this stream of gas and
all the dust that gets kicked up with it, it
shoots out into space. And well Newton's third law, for
every action there's an equal and opposite reaction.
Speaker 1: So the gas shooting out one way pushes the comet
the other way.
Speaker 2: Exactly, It's like thousands of tiny random rocket thrusters firing
off the surface. It's a very small push, a non
gravitational force, but it's continuous, and it's enough to slightly
alter the comets path to accelerate just a little bit
more than gravity alone. Would we account for this in
all our models? It's completely normal?
Speaker 1: Okay. So if that's the normal expected mechanism, the push
from its own outgassing. Ye, and that's been ruled out
for three I atlas, what are scientists left with.
Speaker 2: You're left with a profound problem. You're left with unexplained energy.
I mean, gravitational mechanics are incredibly precise. We can predict
the path of a planet centuries from now. If an
object deviates from that gravitational path, it means some other
force is acting on it.
Speaker 1: And you've just ruled out the most common natural one.
Speaker 2: Right when you rule out the one force you can
quantify and expect, you have to start looking for a
cause that is well much more profound. It's the difference
between watching a thrown rock follow a perfect arc and
watching that rock suddenly speed up and take a hard
right turn mid air.
Speaker 1: And this deviation it's not a subtle thing, is it?
The source material? Says its course is changing erratically, mysteriously.
It even gives the impression that something inside it is
controlling the motion. I mean, that's a pretty dramatic statement
for a scientific report.
Speaker 2: Oh that's the phrase that just sends a chill down
your spine, Isn't it as if something inside it is
controlling the motion? In classical astronomy, we just don't use
language like that. We never imply agency or self direction
for an inert celestial body. So when you see that
phrase applied to a lone chunk of rock and ice,
it signals a complete failure of our models. It means
our understanding of how this object should behave has broken down.
Speaker 1: It suggests the force isn't like a smooth external push
from the sun, but something else, something internal maybe or.
Speaker 2: Variable exactly like a series of controlled pulses or burns,
not a gentle, steady outgassing.
Speaker 1: So its movement is a puzzle. And then there's its appearance,
which is a whole other can of worms. Let's talk
aout the light the glow.
Speaker 2: Yes, the visual anomaly three I Atlas has this unexpected luminosity.
It has a green glow that is burning brighter than
expected especially for an object that's traveled through interstolar space
for you know, maybe millions of years, you'd expect it
to have lost some of that easily vaporized surface material.
Speaker 1: The sources use some really vivid language for this. They
describe the glow as cutting through telescopic feeds like an
emerald wound in the night sky. It sounds incredibly intense.
Speaker 2: And that imagery really captures what the telescopes are seeing.
That specific green color it comes from a bit of chemistry.
It's caused when intense solar radiation hits and excites molecules
of something called diatomic carbon C two and sometimes cyanogen.
They're simple carbon based molecules that are frozen on the comet.
Speaker 1: Okay, so if it's brighter than expected, what does that
actually imply.
Speaker 2: It points to one of two things, and both are
a problem for the natural comet model. First, it could
mean the object just has a way higher concentration of
these volatile materials than we predicted, which would be odd
for an interstellar traveler that's been battered by cosmic rays
for eons.
Speaker 1: You'd think it would have less of that stuff on
the surface, not.
Speaker 2: More exactly, or the second option, and this is maybe
more likely. The rate of outgassing is just off the charts.
It's shedding this material at a speed that's well, it's
basically unprecedented for an object of its size at it's
current distance from the Sun.
Speaker 1: So wait, this brings us to a huge contradiction, doesn't it.
On the one hand, the acceleration problem implies it's moving
without the big gas cloor it would need to push it.
But on the other hand, the intense brightness suggests it's
outgassing like crazy, producing a massive cloud.
Speaker 2: You've hit it perfectly. That is the core paradox. It
seems to require both massive mass loss to explain the
brightness and at the same time insufficient mass loss to
explain its movement via the normal solar wind model. It's
a bundle of contradictions, chemical, kinetic. It just doesn't fit
our expectations for any natural celestial body we've ever seen.
And that's why the scientific community went from oh, look
a new object to all hands on deck so quickly.
Speaker 1: Because it's breaking the fundamental rules we thought we knew.
Speaker 2: It's breaking the rules of inertia and sublimation that our
entire signs of comets is built on all right, So now.
Speaker 1: We have to escalate this. We move from the general
problem of its weird movement to a very specific detail
that well, it makes this object truly unique. The anti tail.
This is where it goes from an interesting scientific puzzle
to something that feels structurally impossible.
Speaker 2: This is the lynchpin. This is the detail that breaks everything.
To understand it, we should quickly recap what a normal
tail looks like, k lay it out for us. A
typical comet usually has two tails. There's the dust tail,
which is made of heavier particles and it can curve
a bit because of the comet's momentum. But then there's
the ion tail or plasma tail. It's made of charged
gas particles and it is always blown directly away from
the Sun by the solar wind.
Speaker 1: Exceptions like a windsock and a hurricane can only point
one way.
Speaker 2: A perfect analogy that direction is non negotiable. The Sun
is the great pusher, the dominant.
Speaker 1: Force, but not for three I outlests.
Speaker 2: No. The anomaly here is the anti tail, and it's
exactly what it sounds like. It's a jet of dust
and gas that is pointing towards the sun, not away
from it.
Speaker 1: Let that sink in. It's actively ejecting material against the
most powerful force in the inner solar system, against the
solar wind.
Speaker 2: Yes, against solar radiation pressure. It's pushing back.
Speaker 1: What stands out to you about that? I mean, the
source material is so emphatic, it says, and I'm quoting here,
Nothing in known physics explains this, not solar wind, not rotation,
not gravitational drag. That's just it's a dismissal of every
known force that should be in play.
Speaker 2: It is. And if you connect this to the bigger picture,
the anti tail fundamentally challenges our understanding of how forces
work in space. We know how powerful the solar wind is.
We have decades of data from satellites. So what force
localized to this one object is powerful enough to overcome
that and push a jet of material inward.
Speaker 1: It almost sounds like a shield or a propulsion system
fighting against the current.
Speaker 2: It implies one of two things. Either the object has
its own incredibly powerful magnetic field that's deflecting the solar
wind and funneling this outgassing in a specific direction, or
it has an expulsion mechanism, a controlled jet that is
so powerful its thrust overcomes the Sun's push.
Speaker 1: Okay, let me be the skeptic for a moment. Could
this just be some kind of weird optical illusion, maybe
related to the way the object is spinning, Like if
a chunk of material on a shadowed pull suddenly vaporizes,
Could the angle make it look like it's pointing toward
the Sun.
Speaker 2: That's a necessary scientific question, right, and it's one researchers
have been wrestling with. But the sources seem to explicitly
rule out rotation. A complex spin can create weirdly shaped tails, sure,
asymmetrical tails, curved ones, but it doesn't create a jet
of material that is physically moving against the solar wind
vector from curial. To move toward the Sun, it has
to have its own powerful momentum. It has to be fired.
Speaker 1: Essentially, so the amount of force needed to do that.
Speaker 2: It would be astronomical. It's a profound kinematic challenge. It
really suggests a force that we just haven't accounted for
in our standard models of the universe.
Speaker 1: And this complete failure of our models. It leads us
directly to the work being done by the Harvard astrophysicist
Avilope he's been looking at these interstellar objects for years.
Speaker 2: Yes, and his analysis is so critical here because he's
not just saying it's weird, he's trying to quantify how
weird it is. He attributes the motion to non gravitational acceleration,
which again just means it deviated from a path sculpted
by gravity alone.
Speaker 1: And he did the math on what it would take
for a natural comet to move like this.
Speaker 2: He did, and this is a key calculation. He determined
that for the acceleration to be caused by normal outgassing,
the object must have lost a significant fraction of its mass.
Speaker 1: And you put a number on it.
Speaker 2: He did somewhere between ten and twenty percent of its mass.
Speaker 1: Whoa okay, stop pause in that number. Ten to twenty
percent of its entire mass. That sounds like a truly
colossal amount of material. Can you put that in perspective
for us?
Speaker 2: It's almost incomprehensibly large. Think about Halley's commet, probably the
most famous, most active commet we know. Halle's loses about
one tenth of one percent of its mass per orbit,
and an orbit takes seventy six years, so a.
Speaker 1: Tiny fraction over a very long time a tiny fraction.
Speaker 2: Haley's has been around for millennia. What Lup is saying
is that for three I atlas to be a natural commet,
it would have to shed a tenth to a fifth
of its entire body. Think of a small mountain turning
into dust and gas in the few months we've been
watching it.
Speaker 1: That's not sublimation. That's more like a slow motion explosion.
Speaker 2: And if that were actually happening, if a mountain's worth
of material was being vaporized, we'd see it right the
sky around it would be full of debris.
Speaker 1: You'd have to And that's the critical point Lote makes.
If he had lost that much mass naturally, he says,
there should be a massive cloud of gas around it,
something we could easily detect with our telescopes and spectroscopes.
Speaker 2: And the implication is that cloud isn't there, or at.
Speaker 1: Least it's nowhere near big enough to account for the
acceleration we're seeing. The books don't balance, The math just
doesn't work.
Speaker 2: So we're back to the core mystery. If the mass
loss that should be there isn't there, what is driving
the acceleration. It's a violation of the conservation of momentum,
at least as we understand it. For comments, the change
in its velocity demands a force. If that force is natural,
it demands a corresponding loss of mass that we can see.
When you can't find that mass loss, while the source
of the thrust becomes deeply, profoundly mysterious.
Speaker 1: And this is the moment in the conversation that just
grabs all the headlines, because this astrophysicist, after running all
the numbers on the natural explanations, concludes that this behavior
is a sign of something engineered, not random.
Speaker 2: That statement is it's a monumental one, and it's coming
from a respected scientist who has basically exhausted the known
natural explanations. It's important to understand what he's doing. He's
not just jumping to conclusions. He's making a scientific inference
based on the failure of every other hypothesis. The data
doesn't fit a natural object.
Speaker 1: But I have to push back on that one more time.
Isn't saying it's engineered just a placeholder for we don't
know yet. Couldn't there be some exotic national mechanism we've
just never encountered before.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, And that is exactly what other scientists are working
on right now. They're diving into material science, exotic chemistry.
Speaker 1: Like what what are some of the theories?
Speaker 2: Well, some have proposed that maybe the object had a
thermal fracture, like the heat from the Sun caused a
huge crack, releasing a massive, short lived jet of gas,
a sort of natural one time rocket burn.
Speaker 1: That could explain a sudden acceleration.
Speaker 2: It could, but it doesn't easily explain the erratic ongoing
course changes or that persistent anti tail. Others are looking
at its composition. What if it's made of something we've
never seen. Maybe it has dense metallic components that are
interact with the Sun's magnetic field in a new way.
Speaker 1: But even those ideas would leave a signature, Okay, they.
Speaker 2: Should, They'd still require some kind of observable energy source
or mass loss. And that's Lope's core argument. Given the
specific data we have, the high acceleration combined with the
unobserved mass ejection, the simplest explanation that fits all the
facts is some kind of controlled efficient mechanism, something that
can convert internal energy into directed thrust without you know,
just spraying a mountain's worth of debris all over the.
Speaker 1: Place, So the lack of evidence for a natural cause
becomes in itself evidence for an artificial one.
Speaker 2: In a way, yes, it's a huge leap, but it's
a leap founded on a deep crisis in the physics.
It forces us to treat the sky as a laboratory
where our assumptions are constantly being tested, and the clock.
Speaker 1: Is ticking right. The window to gather the data that
could tell us that this is new physics or something else.
It's closing fast, and that's why we're seeing this massive
global response exactly.
Speaker 2: That's what's driving the mobilization.
Speaker 1: So this breakdown in physics, it's so profound that it's
triggered a truly global response. We're told the telescopes all
over the world are now locked onto this thing.
Speaker 2: This is a textbook case of what happens when the
scientific community identifies a high priority target. It's a unique
fleeting opportunity and they know it. NASA and the European
Space Agency ESA. They haven't just been passively watching the sources, say,
they've intensified observations and moved to constant monitoring.
Speaker 1: What does constant monitoring actually mean in practice? Does that
mean the hubble is just staring at it twenty four
to seven.
Speaker 2: It means they're dedicating significant resources to it. They're interrupting
other projects, bumping other observation schedules to give dedicated time
on their most sensitive instruments to three I at lists
and ESA is specifically pulling data from both ground based
telescopes and space assets. That's a crucial combination.
Speaker 1: Why both what do you get from the ground that
you can't get from space and vice versa.
Speaker 2: Well, the big ground based observatories like the VLT and
Chile or the CA in Hawaii, they give you incredible
visible light images and most importantly, spectroscopy. They break down
the light to figure out the chemical composition of the
coma and the tail. They're hunting for those C two
and CN molecules, but they're limited by our own atmosphere.
It blurs the images and absorbs certain wavelengths of.
Speaker 1: Light, and that's where the space telescopes come in.
Speaker 2: That's where Hubble and maybe even the James Web Space
telescope come in. They can see in ultraviolet and deep infrared.
UV is vital for spotting certain gases that are atmosphere blocks,
and infrared can measure temperature, is their hot spot, is
it venting heat from one specific place? These are all
data points that could help test that engineered hypothesis.
Speaker 1: So this mobilization pointing the world's best instruments at an
object two hundred and sixty nine million kilometers away, it
really underscorees how seriously they're taking this scientific puzzle threat.
Speaker 2: Level aside completely, and that distance is key. Two hundred
and sixty nine million kilometers is about one point eight
times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. It's
way out past the orbit of Mars. It's safely far away,
which allows everyone to just focus on the science without
worrying about planetary defense.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to the United Nations. The International Asteroid
Warning Network or IAWN, is also involved. We're told they
are very closely.
Speaker 2: Watching, and their involvement isn't about an immediate risk. It's
a function of protocol and uncertainty. Iawn's main job is
to track near Earth objects or NEOs and coordinate a
response if one is on a potential impact course, but
their mandate also includes tracking any object that behaves unpredictably.
Speaker 1: And unpredictably is definitely the word for three IAT lists.
Speaker 2: It's the definition of it.
Speaker 1: But the officials they're really stressing a key point for
the public here. They're saying IAWN is tracking it as
a matter of protocol, not threat. What does that protocol
actually involve?
Speaker 2: So an object like this gets put on a watch list,
that happens when its future path becomes difficult to reliably
predict with three i AT lists. That non gravitational force
is so big and so erratic that our standard computer models,
the ones we use to project trajectories years into the future,
they've basically broken down. They can't predict where it's going
to be with any certainty. So IWN has to track
it because its path is scientifically volatile, not because it's
going to hit us, but because the uncertainty demands they
keep constant, validated track on it.
Speaker 1: So the high alert we're hearing about is a scientific
high alert. The urgency is about a fleeting chance to
study something revolutionary, not an incoming threat.
Speaker 2: Precisely, Ideman's involvement just confirms that this object has crossed
a very specific threshold of scientific interest and trajectory weirdness.
They're the global hub collecting data from NASA ESN telescopes
in Japan everywhere, and putting it all together to maintain
one single, official, consistent track of this object, which is
essential when the object itself seems to be actively trying
to throw off our predictions.
Speaker 1: It's fascinating to see how the whole global scientific machine
just snaps into place for something.
Speaker 2: Like this, and we have to remember the history. This
is the third interstellar object we've confirmed. The scientific community
was maybe caught a little bit flat footed with on
Aamua back in twenty seventeen. Umurama also showed non gravitational acceleration,
but it did so without any visible tail or gas cloud,
which is what led to the first round of these
engineered hypotheses.
Speaker 1: So this time they were ready.
Speaker 2: This time they were ready. They mobilized immediately because they
know the observation window is short, and they know that
three I at Lias is presenting anomalies like the anti
tail that are even more bizarre and harder to explain
than um UMA's worth.
Speaker 1: Umu was was strange and subtle. Three eye Atlas is
just openly defiant.
Speaker 2: Defiant is a great word for it, both visually and kinematically.
Speaker 1: So if the science is the engine of this story,
then the philosophical implications. That's where things get really profound.
This object is forcing us to confront the limits of
what we think we know.
Speaker 2: That's the real intellectual talent here. The sources mentioned the
perspective of some researchers, including prominent voices in the Search
for Extraterrestrial Intelligence or SETI, and they argue that objects
like three I at lists are forcing science to keep
an open.
Speaker 1: Mind, which seems like a healthy thing for science, doesn't it.
We can't just leap to its aliens, obviously, but we
also can't just dismiss the questions when our own physics
can't provide an answer. We have to be open to
the idea that there are things in the universe we
just haven't cataloged yet.
Speaker 2: And the source material frames this debate so well. I
think this is a key takeaway for everyone listening. It
says the debate is not about aliens. It is about
exploring about recognizing how little we truly know about what
drifts between the stars.
Speaker 1: I love that it shifts the whole conversation. It's not
about speculation, It's about epistemology. What do we actually know
and how do we know? Our models of physics are
truly universal.
Speaker 2: So what does this mean for astrophysics. It means this
object is an opportunity to rewrite the textbooks. It means
the standard model of a comet, you know, a dirty
snowball left over from the formation of a star system,
might not apply to these interstellar travelers. They might have
formed it under completely different conditions, or maybe they've been modified.
Speaker 1: Well, if the engineered hypothesis were ever proven correct, that
just opens up a whole new reality. Obviously, but even
if it turns out to be some incredibly exotic natural object,
that's still a massive discovery.
Speaker 2: A massive discovery if it's a comet made of materials
we've never seen that react to the Sun in a
way we've never predicted, that forces a huge revision of
our models. We are literally getting a sample of the
chemistry from another star system billions of kilometers away.
Speaker 1: Every little anomalous detail is like a clue on a
treasure map telling us how other solar systems might work.
Speaker 2: And the urgency is so real because this moment is
so fleeting, The sources describe it as a brief visitor.
As three Atlas flashes past Earth. It will not slow
down it will not return. We are in a unique
observational window that is measured in weeks and months, not years.
Speaker 1: Whatever secrets it carries will leave with it unless we
learn to read them fast enough. That really captures the stakes.
It's a scientific race against time and cosmic speed.
Speaker 2: And the final thought from the sources is just so
powerful and perfect for a brief moment. The universe is
knocked on our door and science is listening this knock.
It isn't a threat, it's a revelation. It's a chance
to test physics itself. If our laws fail in the
face of these interstellar travelers, then the rules of the
galaxy are far far stranger than we ever imagined.
Speaker 1: And all these anomalies, the weird acceleration, the erratic path
at physically impossible anti tail, they combine to make this
object the single most valuable piece of interstellar data we've
ever received.
Speaker 2: And that's why NASA, ISA and iw and are all watching.
It's not a threat. It's a potential blueprint for something
we don't understand, and that race to decipher it is
happening right now. Two hundred and sixty nine million kilometers
a way.
Speaker 1: That was an incredible look into this interstellar enigma. Let's
just quickly recap the absolute most shocking aspects of three
i at lists that are driving this global effort.
Speaker 2: Okay, First the motion, the kinetics. It's accelerating without a cause.
We can explain the standard comet tail as a rocket
model just doesn't work. It implies a non gravitational forces
at play.
Speaker 1: Second, the structure that anti tail, a jet of gas
and dust pointing impossibly toward the Sun fighting against the
solar wind. That requires some kind of powerful localized internal
force we can't explain.
Speaker 2: And third the math Avi loops calculation. If this were
a normal comet, it would have had to lose ten
to twenty percent of its mass to move like this,
and there's no evidence of that massive cloud of debris.
That lack of evidence is what lends weight to the
hypothesis of something engineered.
Speaker 1: So we have an object speeding through our system, carrying
secrets we can't yet decipher and challenging the very foundations
of physics we thought were universal. The window to watch
it is closing. So my final question is this, if
our known physics, solar wind, gravity, rotation, all of it,
if it can can't explain the movement or the appearance
of three I at Lias. What kind of scientific leap,
what kind of paradigm shift do we need to make
to read the secrets of the universe before they're gone forever.
Speaker 2: That's the ultimate question. Is the anomaly in the object itself?
Is it made of something new? Or is the anomaly
in us? Are scientific models just too limited for what's
really out there?
Speaker 1: So what do you think? What's your take on a
celestial object that seems to defy all the known rules
of motion When you hear the data and you hear
that the natural explanations are failing, does the concept of
something engineered feel like a necessary scientific step or is
the leap too far? Let us know what you think.