Speaker 1: Welcome to the deep dive. Today, we're tackling something truly
mind bending, an object hurtling through our solar system at
one hundred and thirty seven thousand miles per hour. It's
from another star system, and frankly, it's causing chaos. It's
forcing scientists to well rethink some fundamental laws of the universe.
Speaker 2: He really is. This isn't just a thought experiment.
Speaker 3: We're talking about hard data here, thousands upon thousands of
observations of this object. Its official name is three I
less and when you put all that data together, it
just doesn't add up with our standard models.
Speaker 1: It's the kind of thing that probably keeps astrophysicists a wake.
Speaker 3: At night, right absolutely, because every time you think you've
figured out one weird thing about it, two more inconsistencies
pop up.
Speaker 2: It defies easy explanation.
Speaker 1: And the reason we're diving deep today October third, twenty
twenty five is because the implications are well enormous. AVI
who you know, it's very prominent, sometimes controversial ascrophysicist.
Speaker 2: Very respective though in many circles.
Speaker 1: Right, he's actually put a number on it. He's rated
the likelihood of this visitor being technological in origin at
a six out of.
Speaker 2: Ten sixty percent.
Speaker 3: That's not a trivial number coming from someone like him,
and it's not based on speculation. It's rooted entirely in
the physics and the chemistry we're seeing, which is what
we want to unpack today.
Speaker 1: Exactly. A sixty percent confidence rating is basically saying, look,
the natural explanations we have, they're starting to look pretty shaky.
Speaker 3: We've pulled together everything we can find, the spectral analysis
from James Web, from the very large telescope, crucial orbital
tracking data. It's a mountain of information.
Speaker 1: So our mission today is to sift through that mountain.
We want to go past the headlines and really dig
into the specific data points that are causing all this friction.
The statistical problems like why should this thing even be here?
The chemical signatures that seem well impossible according to standard
cosmic chemistry, and the timing of its path just suspiciously convenient.
Speaker 3: You could say it's much more than just a peculiar commet.
It feels like an object that actively challenging several pillars
of astrophysics.
Speaker 2: All it wants.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's get into it. Let's unpack this cosmic mystery.
All right, let's start with the basics. We know three
it tells is fast, but its size and mass that's
where the first big red flag goes up. We've got
what over four thousand observations now.
Speaker 3: Yes, compiled from over two hundred observatories across the globe,
a massive effort, and they all point towards an object
that's incredibly massive, so massive in fact, that its discovery
kind of breaks statistics.
Speaker 1: How massive were we talking?
Speaker 3: The calculations based on how it's moving and how it's
resisting forces that should be disrupting it. Give us a
lower limit, a minimum mass of about thirty three billion.
Speaker 1: Tons thirty three billion tons billion.
Speaker 2: With a B.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that translates to a solid nucleus, the core of
the object being at least five kilometers in diameter, probably larger.
Speaker 1: Okay, put that in perspective. How does that compare it
to other interstellar visitors we've seen.
Speaker 2: Well, that's the thing.
Speaker 3: The only two others we've confirmed were Umamua and comet Borisov.
Umuah is maybe a few hundred meters long, Borisov perhaps
a kilometer across at the very most. This object three
eyed class is potentially three to five orders of magnitude
more massive.
Speaker 1: That's that's not just bigger, that's a completely different category
of objects exactly.
Speaker 3: It's like, you know, our models predict finding pebbles and
maybe the occasional baseball rolling through from interstellar space, and
instead the third thing we find is a Mount Everest.
Speaker 1: It completely messes with our expectations, doesn't it? Finding something
this big this soon?
Speaker 2: It does?
Speaker 3: This leads us straight into the statistical problem. Our understanding
of the stuff floating between stars, interstellar dust, ice rocks
suggests a predictable sized distribution. It's called a power law. Basically,
there should be lots and lots of tiny things, fewer
medium sized things, and extremely vanishingly few really big things.
Speaker 1: Makes sense, like sand versus boulders on a beach.
Speaker 3: Precisely so, according to that power law, over and based
on the number of small objects like umuhmoah, we should
be deta.
Speaker 2: We'd expect to.
Speaker 3: Find roughly one hundred thousand of those smaller ones before
we had a statistically reasonable chance of stumbling upon one
single object as massive as three I tell.
Speaker 1: Us one hundred thousand. We found two small ones before
this giant.
Speaker 3: Correct Umumoua and Borisov, and then Boom number three is
the behemoth.
Speaker 2: It's like, as you said.
Speaker 3: Earlier, buying three lottery tickets in your life and hitting
the jackpot on the third one.
Speaker 1: So either we are absurdly astronomically lucky, or.
Speaker 3: Our understanding of how much massive debris is actually out
there between the stars is fundamentally wrong. Maybe the Milky
Way is just littered with these five kilometer plus rogue
objects and we had no idea.
Speaker 1: Neither of those options sounds particularly comforting. Both point to
a pretty big gap in our knowledge.
Speaker 2: They do. It's a major puzzle just based on its existence.
But then you look at its path, right.
Speaker 1: The sheer size is one statistical headache. But then there's
the projectory coincidence where it came from where it's going.
Speaker 2: That's weird, too, extremely weird.
Speaker 3: Okay, So it's on a retrograde orbit moving backwards compared
to the planets. That part isn't unusual for an interstellar object.
It suggests it wasn't born in our system, okay, But
its inclination, it's tilt relative to the flat plane of
the Solar System is about one hundred and seventy five
degrees one.
Speaker 1: Hundred and seventy five degrees. So if one hundred and
eighty degrees is perfectly flat with the ecliptic plane where
the planet's orbit, it's almost exactly aligned.
Speaker 2: Almost perfectly aligned. That's the key think about it.
Speaker 3: Space is three dimensional, right, Objects coming from interstellar space
should arrive from random directions, diving in from high above,
swooping up from below, hitting at all sorts of angles, like.
Speaker 1: Throwing darts at a board from all around the room,
not just aiming straight exactly.
Speaker 3: The mathematical probability of an interstellar object just happening to
arrive on a path that's so precisely aligned with our
Solar system's flat plane, it's calculated to be only about one.
Speaker 2: In five hundred.
Speaker 1: Okay, one in five hundred, not impossible odds, But he
raises an eyebrow.
Speaker 2: It does.
Speaker 3: But wait, there's more. It's not just that it's aligned
with the ecliptic plane. Its specific path within that plane
is bringing it unusually close to multiple planets. It's making
a close approach to Mars today, and it's headed for
a close encounter with Jupiter next year.
Speaker 1: So it's not just hitting the dark board. It's hitting
the bullseye and the triple twenty on the same throw.
Speaker 3: Kind of Yeah, a truly random trajectory is unlikely to
hit that flat plane and line up perfectly for multiple
planetary flybys like this. It feels optimized, optimized What do
you mean, well, Avilo used the phrase remarkable fine tuning.
If you were hypothetically designing an interstellar mission to scout
our solar system, you'd want to be efficient. You wouldn't
want to waste energy on big course corrections. You'd calculate
a path that uses gravity assists and hits multiple targets
with minimal effort. And the best way to do that
align with the ecliptic plane.
Speaker 1: So you're saying its path looks less like a random
cosmic accident and more like, well, like it was planned.
Speaker 3: The data is consistent with that interpretation. The trajectory looks
engineered for observation. Whether it is engineered is the big question,
of course.
Speaker 1: Okay, but hang on, this thing is also a comet, right.
It's spewing out gas and dust like crazy. Doesn't that
mess up any kind of precise path that brings us
to the non gravitational paradox, doesn't.
Speaker 2: It It certainly should. That's the paradox.
Speaker 3: Commets, by their nature are not perfectly predictable just based
on gravity. As they get near the sun, ices vaporized subliment,
turning directly into.
Speaker 1: Gas, right, they become little rockets.
Speaker 3: Exactly, And because the commet's nucleus isn't perfectly uniform, the
jets of gas spray out unevenly stronger on one side,
maybe weaker on another. This creates a tiny, persistent push,
a thrust. It's called non gravitational acceleration. It nudges the
comet off the path gravity alone would dictate.
Speaker 1: And we know three it Lists is very active. The
James Webspace Telescope measured it, losing what was the.
Speaker 3: Number, and astonishing one hundred and twenty nine kilograms of
carbon dioxide every second. That's a huge amount of gas
erupting off its surface. That should be acting like a
pretty significant rocket engine pushing it around.
Speaker 1: So it should be deviating noticeably from a purely gravitational path.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, even moderately active commets we see typically deviate by
hundreds of meters per day because of this effect.
Speaker 2: But here's the kicker.
Speaker 3: When astronomers tracked three iyatlas using those thousands of observations,
they found its deviation from a purely gravity driven path
was incredibly small, less than fifteen meters per day squared.
Speaker 1: Less than fifteen meters. That's almost nothing compared to the
amount of gasets viewing.
Speaker 3: It's practically zero within the measurement uncertainties. It's showing almost
no non gravitational acceleration despite this massive visible outgassing.
Speaker 1: How is that possible. It's firing its engines, but it's
not moving off course.
Speaker 3: It's resisting the push. And the only way an object
can resist that kind of continuous force from outgassing is
if the object itself is incredibly massive and dense.
Speaker 1: Ah, So this observation actually reinforce is the huge mass.
Speaker 3: Calculation precisely that thirty three billion ton minimum mass isn't
just based on its discovery. It's required to explain why
the outgassing isn't throwing it off course. If three ilis
were a typical commet, often described as a loosely bound
rubble pile of ice and dust, it would be.
Speaker 1: Getting pushed around significantly or maybe even torn apart by
that much outgassing.
Speaker 3: Exactly, the fact that it's holding together and sticking so
closely to its gravitational path demands that it be a solid, coherent,
and extremely massive body.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's just pause and absorb that. Statistically, it's way
too big to be found this easily. Its path is
suspiciously aligned and optimized like one in five hundred odds
or worse. And despite acting like a powerful rocket, it's
so massive and dense it barely budges off course.
Speaker 3: That's the physical picture. Yeah, a complete anomaly based on
gravity and statistics alone.
Speaker 1: All right, If the physics is already making our head spin,
let's turn to its composition, because the chemistry seems to
be just as baffling, if noth so baffling is.
Speaker 2: A good word for it.
Speaker 3: If the physics were just strange, The chemistry seems to
actively defy what we know about how the universe builds things.
And the first major shock wave came from the nickel
without iron bombshell.
Speaker 1: Okay, nickel without iron. This came from the very large
telescope observations. What did they see exactly?
Speaker 3: They were looking at the light spectrum from the gas cloud,
the coma surrounding the nucleus. As the ices sublimate, they
carry traces of heavier elements off the surface with them,
and the VLT detected very clear, strong emission lines, unambiguous
signals of neutral nickel atoms streaming away from the object.
Speaker 1: Nickel. Okay, that seems specific. What's the problem.
Speaker 3: The problem is what wasn't there in that same plume
of gas. There was absolutely no detectable trace of iron,
none whatsoever.
Speaker 1: And why is finding nickel without iron such a big deal?
Aren't they just metals?
Speaker 3: Ah? But in cosmic terms, they're practically inseparable twins. Nickel
and iron are forged together in the hearts of dying
massive stars during supernova explosion. That's the main process supernova
nuclear synthesis.
Speaker 1: They're made in the same stellar furnace at the same time.
Speaker 3: Exactly, so when the star explodes, it spews both nickel
and iron out into the interstellar medium together. They travel together,
they condense into dust grains together, and they get incorporated
into new stars. Planets, asteroids, comets always together and usually
in fairly predictable ratios.
Speaker 1: So every natural space rock we've ever looked at.
Speaker 3: Has both every single one. Meteorites found on Earth asteroids.
We've visited comets from our own solar system. They all
contain both iron and nickel. Finding nickel without iron in
a natural object arriving from interstellar space, it's not just unexpected,
it fundamentally contradicts our understanding of cosmic chemical evolution.
Speaker 1: The analogy used was like finding smoke without fire.
Speaker 3: It's a perfect analogy. You simply don't get one without
the other in a natural cosmic setting. They are chemically
bound by their shared origin.
Speaker 1: Okay, so if it's not natural, where do you find
nick separated from iron?
Speaker 3: Well, that's where it gets really uncomfortable for astronomers. The
only place we know of where nickel is routinely and
deliberately separated from iron is here on Earth in industrial.
Speaker 1: Processes, industrial like manufacturing.
Speaker 3: Precisely, think about creating high purity nickel for specialized applications
superllois for jet engines, specific electronic components, aerospace parts where
you need nickels heat resistance or specific properties, but you
want to avoid iron's magnetic characteristics or weight. That requires
industrial refining to separate the cosmic twins.
Speaker 1: So the chemical signature seen coming off three ilch matches
factory production, not a natural comet.
Speaker 3: The signature is consistent with an industrially refined material. That's
the uncomfortable truth the data presents.
Speaker 1: Wow. And wasn't there something about the amount of nickel changing?
Speaker 2: Yes, that's another strange detail.
Speaker 3: VLT observation showed that the rate of nickel emission wasn't constant.
It increased dramatically by a factor of twenty five between
their observations in late July.
Speaker 1: In late August, twenty five times more nickel just a
month later. What does that suggest?
Speaker 3: It suggests something is being systematically exposed or vaporized as
the object gets closer to the sun and heats up.
If you imagine say an outer layer or coating containing
this purified nickel, as the solar radiation intensifies, it's burning
off that layer more and more rapidly.
Speaker 1: Did scientists try to find a natural explanation for this
nickel only signature, Oh?
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
Speaker 3: The immediate reaction was to look for some exotic natural
chemical process. One idea proposed was maybe the nickel was
locked up in extremely volatile compounds like nickel carbonyl that
could somehow survive for billions of years in the cold
of interstellar space and then break apart easily in sunlight,
releasing the pure nickel.
Speaker 1: Okay, seems like a long shot, but possible.
Speaker 3: Well, here's the problem with that idea. Iron forms very
similar volatile compounds, iron carbonyls. If the conditions existed out
there that allowed nickel carbonyl to survive and be delivered intact,
then iron carbonal should have survived two And if that
broke down in sunlight, we should be seeing iron alongside
the nickel.
Speaker 1: But we're not.
Speaker 2: We are not. Only the nickel showed up.
Speaker 3: So even the proposed natural explanation seems to fall short.
It points back to something specific, something artificial, almost an
industrial ghost in the machine, so to speak.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the metal content is bizarre. What about the
actual comet part, the ice and gas that leads at
the dry ice comet idea?
Speaker 3: Right, Yes, if the nickel wasn't strange enough, the composition
of the main gas plume, measured by the James Webb
Space Telescope, delivered another major surprise. Web found the gas
is overwhelmingly carbon dioxide, about ninety five percent CO two,
with only about five percent water.
Speaker 1: Vapor ninety five percent CO two. How does that compare
to comets from our own solar system, it's radically different.
Speaker 3: Comets from our neighborhood, whether they come from the distant
ort cloud or the closer Kuiper Belt, are typically water rich,
often eighty percent water ice or more. This object three
ioutless has sixteen times more CO two relative to water
than any comet ever studied before. It's an extreme chemical outlier.
Speaker 1: Sixteen times. That's not a small difference, YEA. What does
being so CO two dominant tell us about where it
might have formed, assuming it's natural For a.
Speaker 3: Moment, it tells us it must have formed in an
incredibly cold environment, far colder than where our own.
Speaker 2: Solar systems comets formed.
Speaker 3: Carbon dioxide ice only condenses and remains stable at much
lower temperatures than water ice. So if it's natural, it
likely originated somewhere like the ancient thick disk of our
Milky Way galaxy.
Speaker 1: The thick disk that's an older part of the galaxy, much.
Speaker 3: Older and generally colder than the thin disk where our
Sun resides. We could be talking about an object that
formed seven to eleven billion years ago, long before our
sun and planets even existed.
Speaker 1: So if it is natural It's an incredibly ancient relic,
a time capsule from the early Milky.
Speaker 3: Way, potentially yes, which would be incredibly exciting in its
own right. It would be the oldest, most chemically primitive
object we've ever encountered, offering clues about the galaxy's early conditions.
Speaker 1: You have this picture of an ancient super cold CO
two rich natural object, and then you overlay the signature
of modern industrial grade nickel separation. The two pictures just
don't seem to fit together, do they.
Speaker 3: They really don't. It's chemically incoherent. And then things got
even weirder visually, around early September, there was the sudden
color change.
Speaker 1: A color change. How did we notice that?
Speaker 3: This came largely from the amateur astronomy community. Actually, these
are dedicated observers with excellent equipment who monitor objects like
this constantly. Around September seventh, several reputable amateurs reported that
the coma the fuzzy gas cloud around the nucleus, which
had previously looked sort of reddish.
Speaker 1: Reddish usually means complex organic molecules, right, dusts and stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, typical sort of dirty snowball. Organic compounds often give
a reddish tinge. But suddenly, around that date it started
glowing with a distinct bright green, maybe even slightly bluish hue.
Speaker 1: Green doesn't green in comets usually come from something specific.
Speaker 3: It usually comes from diatomic carb in C two molecules
breaking down in ultraviolet sunlight. That's the classic green glow
associated with many comets heads.
Speaker 1: Okay, so it turned green, what's the problem.
Speaker 3: The problem is that earlier spectral analysis the professional studies
had already determined that three ia tellus was one of
the most depleted in carbon chain molecules like C two.
Ever observed it seemingly didn't have the basic ingredients needed
to produce that characteristic green glow.
Speaker 1: So it started glowing green. But it shouldn't have had
the stuff to make green precisely.
Speaker 2: It's another major contradiction.
Speaker 3: Something new must have started happening around early September to
generate that unexpected.
Speaker 1: Color, And did this happen around the same time as
the nickel increase?
Speaker 3: The timing is suggestive. Yes, this sudden color change seems
to coincide with that period when the nickel emission was
ramping up significantly, and crucially, it also correlates with a
rapidly increasing detection of hydrogen cyanide HCN by the VLT.
Speaker 1: Hydrogen cyanide another chemical showing up.
Speaker 3: Yes, a simple molecule mid of hydrogen carbon and nitrogen.
So you have three things happening around the same time.
Nickel emission spiking, hydrogen cyanide production spiking, and the coma
abruptly changing color to green despite lacking the usual C two.
Speaker 1: It sounds like the increasing heat from the sun isn't
just vaporizing the surface layers, but maybe penetrating deeper and
triggering reactions in some different, unexpected material underneath.
Speaker 3: That's a very plausible interpretation. It suggests the object isn't homogeneous.
There might be distinct layers with very different and very
anomalous chemical compositions being revealed as it heats up.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the statistics are wrong, the chemistry is impossible.
Surely when we just look at it with our best telescopes,
things make sense. Apparently not. The visual evidence seems just
as contradictory, starting with this thing called the forward glow
or the anti tail.
Speaker 3: Right. This was seen clearly in a Hubble Space telescope
image taken back on July twenty first, instead of a
tail streaming away from the sun, Hubble saw a distinct
teardrop shaped cocoon of dust that was elongated ahead of
the nucleus, pointing towards.
Speaker 1: The sun, pointing towards the sun. Hang on, that sounds
completely backwards. Can you walk us through why that shouldn't happen?
Speaker 2: Sure?
Speaker 3: Comet tails are formed by two main forces, both originating
from the Sun. First, there's the solar wind, a stream
of charged particles which ionizes gas from the comet and
pushes it directly away from the Sun, forming.
Speaker 1: The plasma tail okay, pushes away.
Speaker 3: Second, there's radiation pressure sunlight itself. Photons hitting the tiny
dust particles released by the comet physically push them away
from the Sun, forming the dust tail pushes away again.
Speaker 1: So, no matter how you slice it, the tail material
gas or dust should always be pointing generally away from
the salt ways.
Speaker 3: There's simply no known physical mechanism in standard comet science
that would cause a significant amount of dust to pile
up ahead of the nucleus resisting the relentless push of
sunlight and solar wind. It violates basic physics.
Speaker 1: So what did the professional astronomers say? When they saw
this Pubble image.
Speaker 3: The official descriptions often use words like puzzling or intriguing.
Some suggested it might be an observational artifact, maybe smearing
in the image due to tracking or some complex projection effect.
Speaker 1: But artifacts usually look random, right smears or glitches. This
was described as a structured tear drop shape.
Speaker 3: That's the issue. It didn't look like a random glitch.
It looked like a specific structure pointing the wrong way.
And if it wasn't an artifact, there was no immediate,
easy physical explanation for it.
Speaker 1: And this ties into another controversy, doesn't it the claims
from amateurs about seeing structure within the glow?
Speaker 2: It does.
Speaker 3: Around the same time the professionals were puzzling over Hubble's
forward glow, some highly respected amateur astronomers using really sophisticated
tracking setups were capturing images that they claimed showed more
than just a fuzzy blob. They reported seeing hints of
structure beneath the dust hard edges, maybe even geometric shapes
within the bright core of the coma.
Speaker 1: So not just a diffuse cloud, but something solid and
define underneath.
Speaker 3: That was the claim that beneath the gas and dust.
The nucleus itself looked less like an irregular potato shape,
which is typical for asteroids and comments, and more like
something structured.
Speaker 1: And how did the professional community react to those claims?
Speaker 3: The reaction was pretty swift and largely dismissive. The immediate
explanations offered were again image processing errors, motion blur from
the object moving, atmospheric distortion, tracking inaccuracies, basically attributing it
to the challenges of photographing a faint moving object.
Speaker 1: But weren't these amateurs using pretty advanced.
Speaker 3: Gear some of them, yes, equipment that in some cases
rivals the capabilities of professional survey telescopes that initially found
objects like three iAtlas.
Speaker 2: There's a certain irony there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it seems like the professionals see their own impossible
thing the forward glow and call it puzzling. But when
amateurs report something equally strange structure, it's immediately dismissed as
user error.
Speaker 3: It does create a kind of double standard, or at
least a missed opportunity for verification. Ideally, when multiple credible
observers report something anomalous, even if it's challenging, the next
step should be to point a more powerful instrument like
WEB or VLT, specifically to try and confirm or refute it.
That follow up on the structure claim seems to have
been largely stipped.
Speaker 1: Over, which must be frustrating if you believe you saw something.
Speaker 3: Real, definitely and the visual contradictions don't stop there. We
also have a puzzle when we look at the object
in a different kind of light, infrared. This is the
infrared contradiction.
Speaker 1: Infrared.
Speaker 2: That's the heat right exactly.
Speaker 3: Infrared telescopes cut through the visible dust and gas to
see the thermal emission, the heat radiating from the object's
surface and the surrounding material warmed by the sun. NASA's
SPHERICX infrared space telescope looked at three IET lists back
in early August, and what did it see?
Speaker 1: Given all the gas and dust Hubble saw, you'd expect
a big, warm, fuzzy blob in infrared.
Speaker 2: You absolutely would.
Speaker 3: If it's shedding one hundred and twenty nine kilograms of
CO two per second plus dust, that material should be
absorbing some light light, warming up and glowing brightly in infrared,
creating an extended heat signature around the nucleus. But Spheric
saw the opposite. It observed three IAT lists as just
a point source.
Speaker 1: A point source like a single tiny dot.
Speaker 3: Exactly indistinguishable from a distant star in their infrared images.
No extended fuzzy coma, no glowing tail, just a single
point of light.
Speaker 1: Yeah, how can that be? How can it be spewing
out tons of material that's visible to Hubble but be
completely compact and point like in the infrared heat view.
Speaker 3: It's a major contradiction. It suggests the object has very
unusual thermal properties. There are a couple of main possibilities.
One the surface might be incredibly reflective, like polished metal
or a very clean mirror like ice. It could be
bouncing almost all the sunlight away before it gets a
chance to absorb the.
Speaker 1: Heat, so it stays cold and doesn't glow, an infrared.
Speaker 2: Right possibility too.
Speaker 3: It might have an extremely effective insulating layer. Imagine some
kind of shell or crust that prevents the sun's heat
from penetrating down to the massive nucleus or warming up
the ejected materials significantly. The outgassing might just be happening
from very superficial pockets, leaving the bulk of the object
and maybe even the plume close to it surprisingly cold, and.
Speaker 1: Neither of those super reflective or perfectly insulated sounds like
a typical, dirty, porous comet nucleus.
Speaker 2: Not at all.
Speaker 3: Natural comets tend to be dark, absorb heat readily, and
show significant extended thermal signatures from their comas and tails.
So the infrared point source observation adds yet another layer
of weirdness, forward glow claims of internal structure and now
extreme thermal compactness. The visual data is just as confusing
as the chemistry and physics which brings us to it.
Today October third, twenty twenty five. This is a really
critical date because it marks the object's closest approach to Mars.
It'll pass within about twenty nine million.
Speaker 1: Kilometers twenty nine million kilometers still quite far, but cosmically speaking,
pretty close for an interstellar visitor. Why why is this
flyby so important?
Speaker 3: Because we have an asset right there, the Mars Reconnaissance
Orbiter MRO, and it carries an incredibly powerful camera called
high Rise. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment MRO is
going to train and take pictures of three ilis during
this flyby.
Speaker 1: What kind of detail can Highrise get from that distance.
Speaker 3: The expected resolution is around thirty kilometers per pixel. Now
that might not sound amazing, but it should be good
enough to clearly distinguish the solid nucleus, the actual five
kilometer plus core, from the surrounding fuzzy gas and dust coma.
It's potentially our best chance yet to get a definitive
measurement of the nucleus size.
Speaker 1: And if he Rise confirms that nucleus really is five
kilometers across or even bigger, what are the.
Speaker 3: Implications then that statistical paradox we talked about earlier becomes
almost insurmountable. The one one hundred thousand odds of finding
something this big this soon, Well, if the size is confirmed,
those odds basically drop to near zero based on current models.
Speaker 1: It would force a fundamental rethink.
Speaker 3: It would essentially force astronomers to say, Okay, either our
understanding of interstellar object population is completely wrong, or this
object's presence here is not random. The natural explanation would
be stretched to the absolute breaking point, possibly beyond.
Speaker 1: And this Mars flyby also plays into that more speculative,
maybe even unsettling idea, the precursor probe theory.
Speaker 3: Yes, this is something Avi Lowi has highlighted based on
the object's trajectory. Again remember that remarkable fine tuning we discussed.
He calculated that the object's path brings it not just
near Mars, but its minimum orbit intersection distance. The absolute
closest its path could possibly get to Mars's orbit is
just two point seven million kilometers.
Speaker 1: That's incredibly close, almost hitting Mars's orbital path.
Speaker 3: Suspiciously close, some would argue, and Lowe's theory, based on
engineering logic, is this. If three I eat lass were
some kind of large interstellar mothership sent for reconnaissance.
Speaker 1: You wouldn't just send the big ship. You'd send out
smaller scouts exactly.
Speaker 3: You'd likely deploy smaller, dedicated probe to get closer looks
at interesting targets like planets. And critically, these probes could
be small enough to be completely undetectable by our telescopes
from Earth.
Speaker 1: What's the detection limit? How small would they need to be?
Speaker 3: At Mars's distance, We'd struggle to reliably spot anything much
smaller than about one hundred meters across. So a technologically
advanced civilization could easily design scout probes, say ten or
fifty meters in size that would be effectively invisible to us, and.
Speaker 1: These hypothetical probes deployed from the main object could potentially
use that close Mars approach to intercept the planet.
Speaker 2: That's the theory.
Speaker 3: The main object passes by, maybe deploys these smaller, stealthy probes,
which then make their own way towards Mars, arriving around
this time.
Speaker 1: So MRO isn't just looking at the main object today.
Speaker 3: That implies a potential, perhaps unstated, secondary objective for high rise.
It won't just be imaging the bright nucleus of three ilis.
It will likely also be scanning the volume of space
around it, especially in the direction ahead of the main
object towards Mars, looking for anything else, smaller points of
light moving in formation, or any object whose trajectory seems
independent of the main body's gravitational pull, potentially vectoring towards Mars.
Finding something like that, well, that would be unambiguous evidence
of deployment of technology.
Speaker 1: And given that finely tuned trajectory, how much effort would
it take for say, the main object to adjust its
course slightly to get even closer or deploy something precisely.
Speaker 2: That's another key point.
Speaker 3: Low calculated that only a tiny velocity change, maybe ten
to fifteen kilometers per second, would be needed to nudge
the object or a deployed probe from that two point
seven million kilometers near miss onto an actual Mars intercept course.
For a commet, a fifteen kilometers change is physically impossible
through natural outgassing. For a hypothetical large craft with an engine,
that's a trivial maneuver, a tiny puff of thrust.
Speaker 1: A tiny puff that we might be about to miss
entirely because of the timing. This leads to the intentional
timing aspect. Yeah, the object disappearing behind the Sun.
Speaker 3: Yes, and this is perhaps the element that raises the
most suspicion for those leaning towards a non natural explanation.
Right after this critical Mars fly by window three I,
allis moves into conjunction with the Sun from our perspective
here on Earth.
Speaker 1: It disappears into the Sun's glare.
Speaker 2: For about two months.
Speaker 3: Yes, from roughly late September through early December. It will
be impossible to observe from Earth because it's.
Speaker 2: Behind the Sun.
Speaker 3: And crucially, the timing couldn't be more well convenient.
Speaker 2: If you wanted to hide something.
Speaker 3: It reaches Perihelion, its closest point to the Sun, on
October thirtyth.
Speaker 1: Right in the middle of the blackout period, and perihelian
is when comets are most active, most revealing exactly.
Speaker 3: That's when they experience the most intense solar heating, the
most outgassing, the most stress. It's the single most important
time to observe a comet, to understand its true nature,
see how it behaves under maximum pressure, maybe even see
if it breaks apart and we are going to miss
that entire window.
Speaker 1: If this we're technological, that period of solar conjunction would
be the perfect time to do things you don't want
observed from Earth.
Speaker 3: Its ideal cover, perform a significant course correction. That ten
to fifteen kilometers burn we talked about would be completely hidden,
deploy those precursor probes hidden, maybe even intentionally shed the
outer cometary disguise layers. Now that it's done its job,
all could happen while it's lost in the solar clear.
Speaker 1: The timing just feels too perfect. It's either an incredible
coincidence of celestial mechanics, a cruel joke on astronomers, or.
Speaker 3: It's a sign of intelligence that understands orbital dynamics and
planet's approach to utilize the Sun as a temporary cloaking
device during its most critical phase.
Speaker 1: So we're basically in the dark until early December.
Speaker 3: December third is the approximate date it's expected to re
emerge from behind the Sun becoming visible again. That will
be an incredibly tense time for astronomers worldwide. Everyone will
be scrambling to get observations.
Speaker 1: What will they be looking for immediately?
Speaker 3: The absolute top priority will be to precisely measure it
its trajectory after perihelium and compare it to the path
predicted based on its motion before perihelium, accounting for the
maximum plausible non gravitational forces from outgassing, and.
Speaker 1: If the path has changed more than physics allows for
a comet.
Speaker 3: If its orbit has shifted in a way that cannot
be explained by gravity and the observed or inferred maximum outgassing,
then you're looking at the signature of propulsion.
Speaker 1: Propulsion means deliberation intent exactly.
Speaker 2: That would be the smoking gun, arguably.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's just quickly recap this extraordinary situation. We've
dived into. We have three. Ialis an interstellar visitor that
is first statistically almost Imposmomi one hundred thousand times bigger
than expected based on its discovery number. Second, it's arrived
on a highly improbable one in five hundred trajectory, almost
perfectly aligned with our planets and optimized for flybys. Check. Third,
its chemistry is defiant, showing industrial grade nickel without its
cosmic twin iron and being made of ancient and super
cold dry ice, a combination that just doesn't mesh naturally.
Speaker 2: Major check there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Fourth, its visual appearance is contradictory, displaying a physics
defying forward glow, possibly having internal structure, and showing up
as a compact point source in infrared heat, suggesting weird
thermal properties like high reflectivity or insulation.
Speaker 2: All documented inconsistencies.
Speaker 1: Yes, And finally, it makes this critical flyby of Mars
today just before executing a perfectly timed disappearing act behind
the Sun during its most active perihelium phase.
Speaker 2: The timing is remarkable.
Speaker 1: It paints a picture. Where As you said, the natural
explanation requires piling coincidence upon coincidence of bond contrived scenario.
Speaker 2: It really does.
Speaker 3: Each anomaly taking in isolation might have a niche, albeit unlikely,
natural explanation. But when you stack them all together, the size,
the path, the nickel, the CO two, the green glow,
the forward tail, the infrared signature, the timing. Maintaining the
purely natural hypothesis requires an increasingly complex It's an improbable
series of unrelated, exotic events all occurring in the same
object at the same time.
Speaker 1: So let's clearly state the two stark possibilities facing us
as we await the upcoming data.
Speaker 3: Okay, possibility A. This is genuinely a natural object, but
one unlike anything we've ever conceived of. It's an incredibly
ancient comment, maybe seven maybe eleven billion years old, born
in the galaxy's cold, thick disk. It's bizarre chemistry. The
nickel the CO two forces us to completely rewrite our
models of element formation and condensation in the early universe.
Its massive size and improbable trajectory are just sheer dumb
luck winning the cosmic glottery multiple times. Every single weird
thing has a separate, highly unusual, but ultimately natural cause.
We are fundamentally wrong about comet formation and interstellar object distribution,
but it's still nature.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's possibility a exotic ancient rule breaking nature and
possibility B.
Speaker 2: Possibility B we are being observed.
Speaker 3: This object is technological. It's immense mass and density explain
its ress resistance to outgassing forces. Its nickel signature is
industrial residue. Its high reflectivity or insulation explains the infrared
point source and perhaps the forward glow. Its trajectory was
deliberately chosen for reconnaissance. Its cometary appearance is a disguise,
perhaps a layer of volatile material designed to mimic a
natural object which is now burning off and revealing stranger
signatures underneath. Its disappearance behind the sun is intentional. In
this scenario, the disguise is working almost perfectly, sowing confusion
while the object behaves exactly as a massive solid potentially controlled.
Speaker 1: Craft WET two confoundly different realities, and the key data
points are coming soon Today's Mars observations.
Speaker 3: From MRO, which might give us nuclear sized conformation or
pharma dramatically detect precursor probes.
Speaker 1: And then December third, when it re emerges, that's when
we check for propulsion signatures in its orbit.
Speaker 3: Correct and further down the line. The Jupiter flyby in
March twenty twenty six could offer more clues, perhaps from
the Juno sacecraft or other observations.
Speaker 1: You know, this whole situation throws a spotlight on something interesting.
Our protocols for finding alien intelligence SETI. They're almost all
focused on detecting radio signals, right beacons.
Speaker 3: Messages overwhelmingly so yes, that's been the strategy for decades
listen for intentional communication.
Speaker 1: But what happens if the first confirmed evidence isn't a
signal but a physical object, a probe, A craft like
three I at lows could be Do we even have
a plan for that?
Speaker 3: That's the critical gap. There is currently no established, internationally
agreed upon protocol within the scientific community for how to
handle the confirmed detection of an interstellar physical artifact. The
verification process for extraordinary claims in science is necessarily slow
in rigorous, often taking months or years of peer review.
Speaker 1: But this object isn't waiting around for peer review. By
next spring, it'll be well on its way out of
the intersolar system, moving incredibly fast.
Speaker 3: Precisely, the timescale of the phenomenon is much faster than
the timescale of traditional scientific verification.
Speaker 2: For something this paradigm shifting.
Speaker 1: So here's the final thought, the thing for you, our listener,
to really mull over. What does this all mean If
the data from Mars today or the orbital data in
December points strongly towards technology structure, probes propulsion, what actually
happens next? Who gets that data first, how's it verified?
And how long does that verification take before the world
is told that perhaps, just perhaps we're not alone and
the visitor's already heading away at one hundred and thirty
seven thousand miles per hour. That gap between detection and confirmation,
that uncertainty, that might be the biggest unknown of all
right now