In July, researchers using the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System survey telescope in Chile made an exceedingly rare discovery: a mysterious object passing through the solar system at far too high a speed to be bound by the Sun’s gravity.
The object, which has since been dubbed 3I/ATLAS — the third interstellar object ever found passing through our solar system — has fascinated the astronomy community ever since. And despite a wealth of data suggesting it’s a natural comet with an icy core or nucleus and a bright cloud of gas and dust, or coma, Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb has maintained that there’s a chance we could be looking at an alien artefact sent by an extraterrestrial civilization.
While Loeb himself has admitted that the probability of 3I/ATLAS being technological nature is getting lower the more we learn, scientists are still probing the mysterious object for any signs of life.
As the visitor made its closest approach to Earth, coming within just 167 million miles on December 19, an international team of researchers from the alien-hunting astronomy project Breakthrough Listen pointed the Green Bank Telescope — the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world — at 3I/ATLAS.
In a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, they revealed sobering — albeit probably expected — results: the telescope failed to detect any “candidate signals” emanating from 3I/ATLAS on the day before it made its closest approach to Earth.
“No artificial radio emission localized to 3I/ATLAS was detected” by the Green Bank Telescope, as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI) noted on its website.
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