The theoretical physicist Abraham “Avi” Loeb has a knack for upsetting people.
This is in part because his credentials are pristine: He chaired Harvard’s astronomy department for nearly a decade, was the founding director of the school’s Black Hole Initiative, continues to teach at the school as the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science, and holds titles like “Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.”
So why does Loeb have the scientific community in a tizzy? Because he’s entertaining the idea that an interstellar object currently racing through our solar system might just be an alien mother ship.
The space oddity in question is called 3I/ATLAS. It is only the third object from outside our solar system that humanity has ever detected. The vast majority of astronomers are convinced it’s simply a large comet that poses no threat to Earth. Loeb, however, is unconvinced by this explanation. He has laid out all the ways ATLAS is not behaving like a comet: its unusual trajectory, which happens to be a perfect tour of our nearby planets; its strange coloring; the way it appears to move like it has an internal engine of some kind.
