Speaker 1: Welcome to the deep Dive, where we take the latest
cosmic developments, the densest research, and the most compelling commentary,
and just we break it all down into the insights
you really need to hear.
Speaker 2: And today we are really strapping in. We're focusing on
a visitor from outside our solar system that has, I
think it's fair to say, ignited a lot more controversy
than it has provided clarity.
Speaker 1: Oh for sure. We're talking about the mysterious interstellar object
own as three ied lists.
Speaker 2: This is truly one of the most fascinating objects discovered
in decades. But the whole story around its official reveal, well,
that's tell The story just as important as the object itself.
Speaker 1: Right, There was this incredible anticipation building around NASA's official
image release. Everyone was waiting and.
Speaker 2: What we got was, frankly a masterclass in anti climax.
We're calling it the unboxing of disappointment.
Speaker 1: That's a perfect way to put it. The atmosphere was electric.
You know, you have this interstellar guest, it's only the
third confirmed object of its kind, and the entire world
is waiting for the definitive images. The final analysis from
the world's leading space.
Speaker 2: Agency and to help us navigate this, this whole maze
of data and frankly bureaucracy. Our main source material is
going to be from a really insightful and very candid
interview with Harvard professor.
Speaker 1: Avi Loobe, the one he did on Fox thirty two Chicago.
Speaker 2: That's the one he was reacting in basically real time
to the official press conference, and his take is, well,
it's essential.
Speaker 1: He has been such a leading voice in encouraging the
scientific community to take these anomalous objects seriously, to not
just dismiss them out of hand exactly.
Speaker 2: His perspective just cuts right through all that institutional hesitation,
and his analysis is invaluable for understanding the unsaid implications
of what NASA actually released.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, so, our mission today is ambitious, but I think
it's clear we're going to use Lob's commentary to peel
back the layers. We're going to unpack what the official data.
Speaker 2: Did confirm and more importantly, what it completely failed to explain.
Speaker 1: Right and why the sheer number of highly unusual features,
what he calls the colossal anomalies, suggests there's this profound
gap in our current understanding of the cosmos. We're going
deep into the statistics, the strange chemistry, all of it, all.
Speaker 2: The uncomfortable questions that the scientific mainstream seems well pretty
determined to just sweep under the rug.
Speaker 1: We're looking for the statistical outliers, the things that just
don't fit.
Speaker 2: The chemical signatures that seem to defy standard stellar physics,
and these bizarre orbital mechanics that challenge everything we think
we know about how these objects should look and behave
when we find them.
Speaker 1: So let's start with the setup, the drama of it all.
Professor Lowe, he's become famous for pushing this idea that
some interstellar objects might have a technological origin, not a
purely natural one.
Speaker 2: Right, So, going into the official NASA briefing, he was already,
let's say, managing his expectations. He was adopting a very
cautious posture.
Speaker 1: And his prediction was just It was unnervingly accurate.
Speaker 2: It was spot on. He stated publicly, I think it
was just an hour before the press conference that he
didn't expect big news. He predicted almost word for word
that NASA would stick to the official mantra, which is
that three I at less is just a natural comment.
Nothing to see here and that any images they released
would be visually inconclusive, probably, in his words, just another
fuzzy ball of light.
Speaker 1: And what was his reaction? Right after the presentation.
Speaker 2: Ended, He confirmed it, and you could almost hear the
resigned frustration in his voice. He just said, I hope
to be surprised and I was not.
Speaker 1: Wow, that simple sentence, I was not. It just speaks volumes,
doesn't it. Yeah about the quality the science they presented
versus all the institutional fanfare leading up to it.
Speaker 2: It truly does. The official images they just confirmed his
lowest expectations. NASA used the predictable excuse right the government
shut down for the forty five day delay in getting
the data out.
Speaker 1: And the highly anticipated imagery from their best instruments like
high rise.
Speaker 2: Exactly what the Hubble images had shown us months ago,
essentially a faint, fuzzy ball of light. There was no
discernible surface detail, no structure. It was a massive, massive
amount of build up for an extraordinarily marginal scientific return.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's move past the visual disappointment for a
second and actually unpack the few scientific nuggets they did
give us. This brings us to Section one reviewing the
new data, so fuzzy balls and water signatures. If they
didn't give us clear pictures, what technical observations did they
actually make.
Speaker 2: That's the right question to ask, because when you have
an event like this, the third confirmed interstellar object, you
point every single observational asset you have at it, both
on Earth and in orbit.
Speaker 1: And LOBE noted that a lot of the information they
presented with stuff we already knew from earlier observations.
Speaker 2: A lot of it. Yeah, we already had basic data
from the Hubble Space Telescope, some glimpses from the James
Webb's Guidance sensor, the Swift.
Speaker 1: Satellite which looks at X rays and UV light.
Speaker 2: Right, and even the Test mission, which is mostly for
finding exoplanets but can be pointed at other things. But
the press conference did name check a few new data sources.
Speaker 1: Okay, so what was new?
Speaker 2: Well, they mentioned the Lucy spacecraft, which is an asteroid mission,
and Maven Soho and high Rise. But the recurring theme,
the real disappointment, regardless of the instrument, was this severe
lack of detail.
Speaker 1: So Lobe's assessment was that all these new images were
just fuzzy and.
Speaker 2: That they ultimately offered no new insight into the object's
fundamental nature or what it even looks like up close.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's pit a moment on Mavin though, because you
said that was a key player. Maven is the Mars orbiter,
the one studying its atmosphere. Why would Maven even be
relevant to an object just passing through the Solar system?
Speaker 2: That is a fantastic point, because it's not intuitive. Mayven
has this unique suite of instruments, and one of them
is a spectrograph. It's designed to look at the composition
of very thin, tenuous gases, specifically around Mars.
Speaker 1: But they could point it at three eye.
Speaker 2: Alos they could, and it was able to detect hydrogen
associated with the object, even from a huge distance.
Speaker 1: And this hydridgen detection, according to Lobe, this was maybe
the most interesting scientific output of the entire press conference.
Speaker 2: It was because it gives us this tiny little window
into the object's physical reality. It's basically the smoking gun
for cometary activity.
Speaker 1: How so explain that connection.
Speaker 2: It's just fundamental chemistry. You get hydrogen when water molecules
ho break apart, solar radiation hits them a process called photodissociation.
Speaker 1: And poof, so sunlight hits the water ice that's sublimating
turning to gas off the surface of three iatls, the
HO molecule splits.
Speaker 2: And you get a hydrogen atom, the H, which is
super light and floats away really fast, and you get
a hydroxyl radical OH, which is a little heavier.
Speaker 1: So detecting that hydrogen lets you work backwards exactly.
Speaker 2: It provides a direct measurement and from that scientist can
calculate the production rate of water coming off the object.
This is the classic established way to measure how active,
how cometary an object is. It's strong evidence it has
volatile stuff like water eye that's turning into gas as
it gets closer to the sun.
Speaker 1: And that wasn't the only detection that pointed to this process,
was it?
Speaker 2: No, it wasn't. Lobe also mentioned the detection of the
hydroxyl itself, the OAH part. He called it hydroxyolight at
one point, but he clarified it was a hydroxyl radical
and it was detected a week or two after three
iAtlas came out from behind the sun.
Speaker 1: So having both the H and the OH.
Speaker 2: It just strongly reinforces the idea that the object is
outgassing water. It confirms its active. So while the visual
data was marginal at best, the spectroscopic data pointed squarely
toward a functioning icy commet.
Speaker 1: But that presents a major paradox, doesn't it. If we
have confirmed chemical activities suggesting this dynamic active object commet
spitting out gas, why were the high resolution images they
released so frustratingly indistinct?
Speaker 2: It really does. It leads you to question the quality
of the equipment or maybe the processing limitations. If this
object is actively spewing out jets of gas, why are
the professional, multi billion dollar instrum images just a fuzzy ball?
Speaker 1: And this brings us to a really inspiring contrast you.
Speaker 2: Mentioned earlier, the amateur observation.
Speaker 1: Yes, this is where citizen science really really shines. While
NASA was releasing this marginal, indistinct professional data, amateur astronomers
were providing something far more interesting.
Speaker 2: A far more interesting visual data point. Yeah, they produced
observations showing multiple jets going in different directions.
Speaker 1: That's just a remarkable feat isn't it From non professional astronomers.
Speaker 2: It's incredible. These are intricate plumes, you know, clear evidence
of highly directional outgassing, and what's astonishing, truly is that
the scientific community is as low put it yet to
see a big telescope imaging those jets. So far, these complex,
detailed plumes have only been captured by amateur telescopes.
Speaker 1: That suggests there's this dedicated, highly skilled group of people
out there who are prioritizing getting the clearest possible detail.
Maybe they're using different observation windows or processing techniques than
the big automated surveys.
Speaker 2: It does. It also, though, raises the uncomfortable question of
whether the official channels were specifically not looking for these details,
or maybe just not prioritizing the release of anything that
looked too complex.
Speaker 1: A predetermined narrative.
Speaker 2: Perhaps it almost implies a lack of scientific urgency and
the existence of multiple possibly erratic jets. That leads us
directly into the ongoing debate about its movement. Is it behaving.
Speaker 1: Normally you're talking about non gravitational acceleration.
Speaker 2: The rocket effect. Yeah. If the outgassing isn't perfectly even,
the force of the gas pushes the object off the
path that you'd predict just from gravity alone. It acts
like a tiny self correcting thruster.
Speaker 1: A very very weak one, but measurable exactly.
Speaker 2: And the calculation and debate over whether three itels actually
shows non gravitational acceleration is, as Loeb says, still being
calculated and debated. This is fundamental because it's usually the
line between an asteroid which is just rock and doesn't accelerate,
and a comet which is and does so.
Speaker 1: If it has significant acceleration, it fits the comet model.
Speaker 2: But if the acceleration is found to be say extreme,
or if it's oddly aligned with those tightly colimated debts
we just talked about, well, it complexity itself just becomes
another anomaly to add to the pile.
Speaker 1: And speaking of anomalies, let's pivot now. This is where
it gets really interesting. We've established the official release gave
us basically fuzzy visuals and a water signature, right, But
to truly get the significance of that, we have to
contrast it with the colossal mysteries, the anomalies that the
data failed to explain or even to acknowledge.
Speaker 2: This brings us to section two, the colossal anomalies of
three ILSs, and this is the absolute core of Loeb's argument.
You can't just slap a label on something, call it
a comet, and then ignore all the characteristics that make
it statistically and chemically unprecedented. He has a whole list
besides twelve anomalies in total, but for this deep dive,
we're going to focus on the three most staggering ones,
the ones that just defy any easy explanation, okay, are.
Speaker 1: With the mystery of how it was made anominally number one,
the nickel iron ratio. The chemical mystery.
Speaker 2: This is a deep, deep chemical puzzle. Low pointed out
this very specific oddity. Instruments detected nickel, but that detection
was not matched by a significant detection of iron.
Speaker 1: So they found nickel but not its partner.
Speaker 2: Basically, yeah, the initial data had quote no iron, just
an upper limit, which means if iron was there, it
was in such trace amounts that it was below what
the instruments could even detect.
Speaker 1: And in normal cosmic objects, asteroids, comets, even the Sun itself,
nickel and iron are like they're inseparable cosmic siblings. Why
is that?
Speaker 2: It's all about how elements are created. They're forged in
the heart of massive stars that then explode as supernovae.
Nickel and iron especially the isotope iron fifty six. They
sit right at the peak of what's called the nuclear
binding energy.
Speaker 1: Curve, meaning they're the most stable elements, the.
Speaker 2: Most stable, so they're produced together in similar, very high
amounts in that universal factory. If you look at the
composition of our own sun, the raw ingredients for a
solar system, there's actually more iron than nickel.
Speaker 1: So to find a celestrical body with a very extreme
ratio of nickel to iron that was never seen before
in any comet, that's like what baking a cake and
finding a ton of flour but almost no sugar. It
just breaks the recipe.
Speaker 2: It fundamentally challenges the recipe of stellar nucleosynthesis. Yeah, and
planet formation. It just challenges the models of where this
object could have formed. If it's not from our solar system, okay,
then it must be from another star system where the
chemical conditions are just drastically different.
Speaker 1: But different in a way we've never seen before. Never.
Speaker 2: And Love makes a really dramatic point here he says,
this high nickel low iron ratio is only typically seen
in one place, right, an industrial production of nickel alloys
that are used for aerospace application.
Speaker 1: Okay, now, let's apply the critical ends here. That's an
enormous logical leap to go from unusual ratio to aerospace application.
What's the non technological explanation. What would the mainstream scientific
community say?
Speaker 2: And that's the crux of the debate. The favored mainstream explanation,
as Lob points out, is basically dismissal by attribution. NASA
will just categorize this as a signature of an unusual
comet that came from a different environment.
Speaker 1: So they just invent a new type of star system
we've never seen to explain it away.
Speaker 2: Essentially, they postulate some specific exoplanetary system that somehow preferentially
filter out all its iron during its core formation, or
had some other unique chemical process. It avoids the statistical
puzzle by placing the anomaly in a context that is
unobservable and distant. It's an explanation, but it requires inventing
a highly specialized, unknown stellar factory just to make it work.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to the statistical puzzle, which is maybe
the most shocking part of the whole thing. Anomaly number two,
the monumental size discrepancyco is it the giant iceberg problem?
Speaker 2: This is pure, unadulterated statistics, and it is genuinely baffling.
Based on all the observational data, the object is estimated
to be at least five kilometers in diameter, and maybe.
Speaker 1: More five kilometers just to give you the listener a
sense of scale. That's larger than Central Park in New York.
It's roughly the size of a small city. That is
an enormous object for a comet, especially for a random
visitor from another star.
Speaker 2: And now we have to compare it to the only
two other confirmed interstellar objects we've ever found, and the
math here is just staggering. Three eyes a less is
at least one thousand times more massive than Comet Borisov.
Speaker 1: Borisov was the second one discovered in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 2: Right, And even more dramatically, it is about a million
times more massive than Umumua, the very first interstellar object
we detected back in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1: Wait, a million times bigger. We found the third object,
and it's a million times bigger than the first one.
That can't be right. That doesn't fit with any standard
model of how populations of things are distributed.
Speaker 2: It completely breaks the expected statistical distribution in astrophysics. This
stuff is usually governed by something called a power wall.
In any random population stars, planets, comets, whatever, you always
always accept to find the small, numerous objects first. The
cosmos should be teeming with tiny things.
Speaker 1: So if this giant iceberg three iitellus.
Speaker 2: Is out there, statistically we should have found a thousand
Borisovs and a million umuras first before we stumbled upon
one of these massive giants. The cosmic inventory is mathematically
upside down.
Speaker 1: It's like dragging a fishing net in the ocean for
the very first time, and your first catch is a
fifty ton blue whale.
Speaker 2: Perfect analogy, even though you know for a fact the
water is dense with millions of plankton and thousands of
small fish that should have been in your net long
before the whale. This is the main anomaly. Lobe stresses.
It's profoundly puzzling, and yet he noted NASA didn't even
mention this monumental statistical oddity during their press conference.
Speaker 1: Not once, And the implications of that are just huge.
If the object is natural, it means the processes that
eject these things from star systems are fundamentally skewed. Towards
sending out massive objects, which contradicts what we know about
stellar system dynamics.
Speaker 2: Or it means our tiny observational sample is so bizarrely
lucky that it just completely invalidates our ability to draw
any conclusions from it. And if it's technological, then the
statistics suggests a very different kind of selection effect. Maybe
massive objects designed for long haul journeys are the only
ones that survive, or maybe they're the only ones that
are targeted toward the inner part of a solar system.
Either way, the statistical puzzle demands a new physics or
a new way of taking a census of the cosmos.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's move to a third anomaly. This one speaks
less to physics and more to just improbable luck or design.
Anomaly number three the miracle alignment the orbital plane luck.
Speaker 2: So three iatlus is moving in the plane of the planets,
what astronomers call the ecliptic plane. This is the flat
disc where pretty much all the familiar our solar system
bodies orbit because that's the plane where the initial disk
of dust and gas settled down to form.
Speaker 1: Everything, and the usefulness of that is obvious. It means
our telescopes on Earth and in orbit can look at
it constantly without having to deal with extreme viewing angles, which.
Speaker 2: Is why the NASA administrators were so happy about it.
They could monitor it so closely, and that right there
is the source of the anomaly. Lob argues this alignment
as a miracle.
Speaker 1: Why a miracle.
Speaker 2: Because interstellar objects, by their very definition, should come from
random directions all across the galaxy. They should approach our
solar system at random angles, completely off the plane of
the planets. It would be a pure coincidence for one
to line up so perfectly.
Speaker 1: So what's the actual probability of finding an object this big,
which we should have found last, that is also perfectly
aligned for us to look at it?
Speaker 2: Lobe calculates the rarity. He states that only one in
five hundred incoming objects would be aligned so well with
the ecliptic plane to allow all these specialized NASA assets
to be used so effectively. It just raises a massive
red flag.
Speaker 1: So we have an object that is chemically unique, statistically
almost impossible in terms of its size, and it's in
a ridiculouly convenient orbital plane for us to observe it.
Speaker 2: The trifecta of weirdness.
Speaker 1: But let's play Devil's advocate here for a second. Yeah,
while one in five hundred is rare, if you look
long enough, you're bound to find one. Right, why is
Lobe framing this specific alignment as a miracle and not
just you know, a statistical rarity we happen to catch.
Speaker 2: Because of the combination of all the anomalies together. If
you just found a small, ordinary comment that happened to
be aligned, you'd shrug and say, Okay, that's our one
in five hundred chance. You'd chock it up to Look,
but that's not what we have here, not at all.
Here the alignment is coupled with the one in a
million size anomaly and the chemically unique composition. The combined
probability of all three things happening in the same object
is well, it's astronomical. It forces you to question if
there's a selection effect on our side, like maybe we're
just only good at seeing things in the ecliptic, or.
Speaker 1: Or there's a selection effect on the object side.
Speaker 2: Exactly that it was deliberately placed there, or it came
from a star system that was by sheer coincidence moving
along the same plane as ours. It's a perfect storm
of improbability, and.
Speaker 1: That takes us to the fourth anomaly, which actually circles
back to the physics of those plumes and the amateur
observations anomaly four the tightly collimated jets. Right.
Speaker 2: We talked about that viewer question earlier about why the
plumes don't seem to be influenced by the object's estimated
sixteen hour rotation log confirmed. This is one of his
key anomalies, and it's a beautiful point of observation that
demands a closer look at rotational physics.
Speaker 1: So if the object is a big spinning ice ball
rotating once every sixteen hours, and it's suddenly erupting material
in these jets, we have a standard physical expectation of
what should happen.
Speaker 2: Physics tells us that the rotation should twist the jets.
It should create what we call wiggles or kind of
spiral pattern as the material leaves the surface and gets
pushed by the spin. Given the typical speed of stuff
in cometary jets, that deflection should be visible, but it's not. Now.
The observed jets are tightly collimated. They shoot out straight
as if they're completely ignoring the centrifical force.
Speaker 1: So what does that imply with the possible explanations.
Speaker 2: Well, there are two main ones. One, the material is
leaving the surface. It's such an incredible velocity, way faster
than we assume for commets, that the sixteen hour rotation
just doesn't have enough time to influence its path before
the material is long on.
Speaker 1: And the second possibility.
Speaker 2: Two, the source of the outgassing is highly localized and
maybe it's focused by some kind of internal mechanism that
counteracts the spin, or maybe our rotation estimate itself is
just wrong or even stranger, maybe the object isn't actually
rotating freely, which would suggest a kind of structural rigidity
you wouldn't expect from a typical commet.
Speaker 1: And Lowe's point is that this is where real science happens.
Speaker 2: Yes, this is a critical opportunity for gaining new knowledge
and science of asking questions or paying attention to anomalies
instead of just throwing your hands up and saying, oh,
it's a commet, and commets do strange things.
Speaker 1: That phrases a conversation ender. Isn't it not a scientific
starting point?
Speaker 2: It's the opposite of science. Science demands we investigate the
strange things. In this case, either we're about to discover
a new super high velocity type of commentary jet, or
the source of that jet isn't just a simple spinning
ice ball. The integrity of those jets challenges our whole
understanding of how this stuff works in space.
Speaker 1: Okay, shifting our focus a bit, now, let's move from
the object's internal properties to the wider context of its
journey and the limitations of our own scientific framework. This
brings us to section three, the constraints of interstellar travel
in physics.
Speaker 2: And this is a really crucial section because we often
get listener questions and philosophical arguments really that are based
more on science fiction than on current science.
Speaker 1: Right, there's this assumption that any advanced alien civilization must
operate beyond our known laws of physics.
Speaker 2: And that's precisely what a listener Adam asked. He suggested
that if the object is billions of years old and
advanced civilization wouldn't be using some ancient comet like spacecraft,
why wouldn't they have discovered FTL travel or wormholes or teleportation?
By now a.
Speaker 1: Very common sci fi question. What was Loeb's take his rebuttal.
Speaker 2: Here is swift, and it's essential for grounding this debate
in scientific reality. He argues that this kind of skepticism
is based on assumptions that have nothing to do with
what we know about physics. We have to assess the
object based on what is physically possible, not on some
hypothetical contradictory technology.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's break down that physics rebuttal. Let's start with FTL,
or faster than light travel.
Speaker 2: It's the cornerstone of modern physics, Einstein's theory of relativity.
It dictates a fundamental speed limit in the universe, the
speed of light. As Lobe states very clearly, FTL travel
is not possible. As far as we know, it doesn't exist.
So if we dismiss an object because it's supposed creators
didn't use a technology that violates our entire understanding of
space time, we're just substituting physics for fantasy.
Speaker 1: And the same logic would apply to wormholes, the other
sci fi staple for zipping across the cosmos.
Speaker 2: Exactly, wormholes, as far as we know, also do not exist.
And what's more, any theoretical model that allows for a stable,
traversible wormhole inevitably opens up the possibility of building a
time machine.
Speaker 1: Which would violate the laws of physics by creating paradoxes,
the Grandfather paradox and all that.
Speaker 2: So the conclusion holds you cannot be skeptical of an
object based on the absence of technologies that do not
exist according to our current verified physics.
Speaker 1: That's a powerful point. If we are searching for evidence
of technology, we have to look for evidence of engineering
something that couldn't form naturally, not for the absence of
a warp drive or a teleportation being. We have to
look for something manufactured within the rules that physics allows exactly.
Speaker 2: We're looking for something that respects the speed limit of
the universe, but shows evidence of controlled operation or unusual
structural integrity, like the high nickel ratio or those tightly
colimated jets.
Speaker 1: But that raises the counter question about its speed. Three
IELs is moving fast, for sure, but it's still way,
way less than the speed of light. Why wasn't it
moving faster? If a civilization built a fast ship, wouldn't
be much faster.
Speaker 2: And that is answered by something we call the selection effect.
This is a fundamental bias in our ability to observe things.
It's a massive blind spot that basically guarantees we will
only ever find slow moving objects.
Speaker 1: Okay, explain that if an object we're moving incredibly fast,
say ten percent the speed of light, what would our
telescopes actually.
Speaker 2: See our current wide field surveys, which are designed to
find faint, little points of light moving slowly against the
background stars, they would fail catastrophically. A very fast object
would just appear to the telescope as a smearing of
the light along a line, a streak, a very dim streak.
The light would be very dim because the exposure time
needed to even detect it would only the object for
a fraction of a second as it whizzed by.
Speaker 1: It's like trying to photograph a speeding bullet with a
long exposure camera. Yeah, you wouldn't get a crisp image.
You just get a faint, indistinct blur.
Speaker 2: Precisely, and the observers, whether they're automated surveys where humans
checking the data, would dismiss it as an object. It
wouldn't fit the signature of a trackable asteroid or a
point source commet. It would just look like noise in
the data. Our surveys are inherently not tuned to detect
objects moving close to the speed.
Speaker 1: Of light, so we're overwhelmingly predisposed to find the.
Speaker 2: Slow ones because they are the only ones that sit
in the field of view long enough for our cameras
to gather enough light to register them as an object.
Speaker 1: That is a crucial insight. It means every interstellar object
we've found so far is a product of our own
technical limitations. We could be missing an entire fleet of
fast moving travelers simply because our digital eyes aren't built
to see them.
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate scientific dilemma. We only find what our
instruments are optimized to see.
Speaker 1: Okay, moving to the question of its origin and age.
A listener Reazel asked where three atolests came from based
on its trajectory and how old it might be.
Speaker 2: The trajectory only tells us one thing for sure. Its
speed is very high relative to the local stars around us.
That high speed confirms its interstellar It's not bound by
the Sun's gravity, but it doesn't tell us its origin
or its age. As lobnoes, we have no clock on
it to measure the duration of its journey. It could
have been traveling for millions or even billions of years.
Speaker 1: And there's a key ambiguity in trying to connect its
speed to its age, isn't there there is?
Speaker 2: On the one hand, the high speed could suggest it
came from a really old star, one that's been kicked
around the galaxy for a long time and naturally picks
up speed through gravitational interactions. That would point to an
ancient origin.
Speaker 1: But the caveat is the ejection mechanism.
Speaker 2: Yes, it could have come from a parent star that
was actually moving very slowly, but the object itself was
given a huge ejection speed from that star, maybe during
a massive planet on planet collision or a gravitational slingshot
near a binary star system.
Speaker 1: So we don't know how much of its speed is
from its parent star and how much is from how
it was kicked out exactly.
Speaker 2: And since we don't know the relative contributions of those
two things, we can't confidently determine its age or its
definitive origin. So unless we make the potentially false assumption
that it just inherited its parent star speed, we're kind
of stuck. It remains a kinematic puzzle wrapped in all
those chemical and statistical anomalies we talked about earlier.
Speaker 1: Which is why we have to focus on the immediate
observable anomalies. They're the only hard facts we really have exactly.
Let's pivot now to section four. This focuses on the
frustrating human and bureaucratic side of this discovery. We're talking
about bureaucracy, data delays and what we might be able
to see in the future. This gets back to that
data hostage situation you mentioned.
Speaker 2: The delay was just truly frustrating for everyone, the public
and the scientific community. The image was held for forty
five days before it was released, forty five days for
an image that, as we've said, offered no groundbreaking new insights.
Speaker 1: It was a marginal image, yet they treated it like
it was classified material.
Speaker 2: And the contrast with other NASA data releases from the
same time period makes the delay around three Ayatlas look
particularly conspicuous. Lobe pointed out that other routine data like
images from the high rise camera on the Mars Reconnaissance orbiter,
were being released quickly, sometimes a day.
Speaker 1: Later, even during the government shutdown that they used as
the excuse for the three Ayalas delay.
Speaker 2: Yes, even during the shutdown, and this contrast led Lob
to conclude that the delay was primarily due to NASA bureaucracy,
which specifically targeted this one high profile object. A rule
must have been set that required administrators, not the scientists
doing the work, to review the data before it could
go public, which.
Speaker 1: Is essentially taking hostage the dissemination of scientific information.
Speaker 2: It is, and it highlights this fundamental differ diference in
organizational culture. In academia, the whole point is rapid dissemination
of knowledge. It doesn't matter what time it is or
if the campus is officially closed.
Speaker 1: Right, an academic scientist would have processed and released that
data immediately, probably from home.
Speaker 2: But in a large government organization, administrative procedures and perhaps
you know, a desire to control the narrative around such
a provocative object can just override the urgency of scientific discovery.
Speaker 1: Okay. The next viewer question goes back to the search
for technological signatures. It connects three ID laws to one
of astronomy's biggest cold cases, the nineteen seventy seven signal.
Speaker 2: The question was could the nineteen seventy seven WOW signal
have come from three IAT loss because it was reported
from the same general direction in the sky, the constellation Sagittarius.
Speaker 1: And Lobe, always advocating for actually checking these things, confirmed
that radio observers did look at three IAT loss after
it was discovered.
Speaker 2: He did. He cited a recent finding I think it
was detailed in one of his medium essays from the
Mirrat Radio Observatory.
Speaker 1: And what did they find.
Speaker 2: The merit report focused on observations they made on November fifth,
and they set a really crucial constraint. They established an
upper limit on any radio transmission power coming from the object,
and the key finding was that the power level being
transmitted was less than that of a cell phone.
Speaker 1: Less than a cell phone. That sets a pretty low
bar for an advanced alien communication technology.
Speaker 2: It does. The conclusion for that observation data is firm.
No cell phone level transmission was detected from three iatless,
so we can definitively rule it out as the source
of a recent high powered deliberate signal. If it were
some actively operating craft, you'd expect transmission levels far beyond
our consumer electronics. This is a powerful constraint on that
active technology hypothesis.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's consider a hypothetical. Now, this addresses the question
of interception, which speaks to our own scientific preparedness. If
three iatlsts were a technological entity and it changed course
at roughly its current speed, how long would it take
to get to Earth?
Speaker 2: Lo Ben mentioned and that if it changed course without
any significant speed boost, it would take a couple of
months or so a few months.
Speaker 1: And this wasn't just a gas.
Speaker 2: No, this wasn't back of the envelope stuff. He actually
co authored a peer reviewed paper on this with Adam
Hibbert and Adam Crow. They modeled this exact interception scenario.
The paper details a specific, very small velocity shift, the
tiny NUTCH that would be required to redirect the object
to reach Earth on various hypothetical target dates.
Speaker 1: And that kind of work is essential because it shows
the scientific rigor is there. It proves that people in
the community are actively engaging with the possibility of a
targeted trajectory, even if the official line is just it's
a comet.
Speaker 2: It shifts the discussion from casual what if speculation to
precise calculations of what would the physics actually require.
Speaker 1: So looking ahead, we won't mention a specific calendar date
since it's in the past, but let's talk about the
best observational window. When was the best chance to finally
get the high quality, non fuzzy data that might actually
resolve some of these anomalies.
Speaker 2: The best opportunity, by far, was always going to be
when three I at lists was at its closest point
to Earth. That's the moment when all our observational assets
can be fully leveraged. It was the best chance to
use hundreds of telescopes on the ground, plus Hubble and
Web in space to get the absolute best data on it.
The coming weeks are crucial for analyzing everything that was
gathered during that flyby.
Speaker 1: It was the last best chance to settle the debate
before it gets too far away for us to observe effectively.
We have to hope that data they secured during that
period finally surpasses the disappointing release we've been talking about.
Speaker 2: Absolutely I think the entire scientific community is holding its
breath for that analysis.
Speaker 1: Let's move to our final section, which really addresses the
philosophical context of this whole endeavor. Section five trust in
the Pursuit of New Knowledge, and this starts with a
very fundamental question from a viewer about trust in the
images themselves.
Speaker 2: The viewer asked whether the images released by NASA are
authentic and not doctors, and Lob's response is a really
profound reflection on the nature of big science projects today.
He says, we can never know fully we the public
and external scientists. We don't have access to the instruments
themselves or the raw, unprocessed data flow, which is the
reality of modern science.
Speaker 1: We're often totally reliant on the integrity and the interpretations
of these huge institutions.
Speaker 2: Science is fundamentally built on a foundation of trust, on
what Lobe calls a code of honor, which dictates that
you should never ever fabricate data, and when violations happen,
and they do occasionally, the scientists involved are punished severely.
The system, for all its flaws, is designed to be
self correcting through replication and peer review.
Speaker 1: But his reason for trusting the authenticity of these particular
marginal images is kind of ironic and well pretty witty.
Speaker 2: It is he says he trusted the data because it
was not very, very impressive. He finds it hard to
imagine that they would make the images fuzzier than they
actually are, right if you.
Speaker 1: Were going to fake something you'd fake something good.
Speaker 2: Exactly, if NASA we're trying to pull off some massive
cover up or fabrication, you'd expect the data to be
either suspiciously pristine showing impossible detail, or suspiciously non existent.
The very fact that the release was so marginal and
fuzzy actually lends it credibility. It suggests this is genuinely
the best data they managed to get at the time.
Speaker 1: So his final takeaway on the press conference remains completely
consistent with his initial prediction. The scientific output was not
much and the quality of data was marginal to what
we already.
Speaker 2: Know, so the focus has to return to the anomalies.
The appropriate scientific response is not to dismiss these extremely
rare properties, but to acknowledge that their existence means we
don't understand the factories that make such things.
Speaker 1: Whether three I at lists is ultimately confirmed as an
extraordinarily rare natural commet or something else. Entirely, the existence
of those anomalies, the huge size, the impossible alignment, the
unnatural nickel iron ratio, it means there's a missing piece
of non knowledge about how it was generated. And that's
the most important message we should be taking away.
Speaker 2: Right We are fundamentally missing a key mechanism in the
cosmos that produces objects like this one. The key message
is that nature or something else has presented us with
a monumental statistical outlier, and to simply label it an
unusual commet and move on is to choose comfortable ignorance
over the thrill of real discovery. We have to hold
onto those puzzles because that's where the next revolution in
our understanding is going to come from.
Speaker 1: That is profound thought. To end on, We've covered the
frustrating data delays, the statistical impossibilities of its size, the
challenges its chemistry poses to our models of how stars work,
and the real constraints of interstellar physics.
Speaker 2: And as we move into the coming weeks, where the
analysis of the best data is hopefully happening, the stakes
remain incredibly high. We found one massive, perfectly aligned object,
yet statistically we are missing the thousands of smaller objects
that should have come first. What is the fundamental flaw
in our cosmic inventory? What mechanism allows this giant iceberg
to appear so early in our search, defying every probability
we understand?
Speaker 1: It's the central question.
Speaker 2: It is if nature made this object, then our understanding
of cosmic factory processes is broken. If engineering made it,
our search parameters for technology are fundamentally flawed. That is
the question that demands a revolution in our understanding of
the universe.
Speaker 1: A question that we hope will be answered soon. Thank
you for taking this deep dog with us.