Last month, astronomers made an exciting discovery, observing an interstellar object — only the third ever observed — hurtling toward the center of the solar system.
The object, dubbed 3I/ATLAS, has caught the attention of Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who has a long track record of making controversial predictions about previous interstellar objects being relics from an extraterrestrial civilization.
While there's been a growing consensus among astronomers that the latest object is a comet, Loeb has continued to entertain the idea that it may have been sent to us by an intelligent species from outside of the solar system — and he's far from backing down.
In a blog post over the weekend, Loeb pointed to observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, which showed a "glow of light, likely from a coma, ahead of the motion of 3I/ATLAS towards the Sun."
A coma is the hazy and luminous cloud that surrounds the nucleus of a comet.
However, there's "no evidence for a bright cometary tail in the opposite direction," he wrote, with scientists suggesting it was evidence that dust was evaporating from the object's Sun-facing side.
The observations led Loeb and his colleagues to an intriguing, albeit far-fetched possibility: is the mysterious space object generating "its own light?"
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