Posted on 11/11/2025 12:52:07 AM PST by blueplum
For the first time, astronomers have picked up a radio signal from the mysterious interstellar visitor as it speeds through our Solar System.
South Africa's MeerKAT radio telescope detected absorption lines from OH molecules...Harvard professor Avi Loeb, who has been studying 3I/ATLAS since the summer, said: 'These molecules leave a distinct radio signature that telescopes like MeerKAT can pick up.'...
Optical images captured on November 9 reveal that 3I/ATLAS is ejecting enormous jets of material both toward and away from the sun. The jets stretch nearly 600,000 miles sunward and almost 1.8 million miles in the opposite direction, roughly the diameter of the sun or the moon in the sky.
At its current distance of 203 million miles from Earth, these distances represent the first clear measurements of the vast size of 3I/ATLAS's activity....
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
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Why assume its density to be so low?
If it is from outside our solar system why does it need to have to have composition similar to our solar systems comets?
If you make assumptions that are incorrect and analyze collected data based on those assumptions you will develop incorrect, faulty theories.
Heck, you might even come to the conclusion that this object is an inter-galactic space ship.
Is it a signal from the microwave oven in the breakroom again?
“Calling occupants of interplanetary, quite extraordinary craft.
And please come in peace, we beseech you”
He works with the WEF. Not to be trusted.
Another poster said it was coming to destroy NYC but after the Mamdani Election it left because New York was destroying itself without outside help!
The headline is deliberately misleading. They are making it sound like the comet is transmitting a radio signal akin to how we use radio communication. It is not.
This is part of radio astronomy. For stars and galaxies, astronomers analyze the spectrum of the emitted light, some of which is in the radio spectrum. The hotter something is, the higher frequency spectrum the light it can emit. So radio “signals” are just emitted light in a particular frequency range. Different materials will emit different spectra. This analysis is of the “emission lines” and is used to determine the chemicals/molecules in the object.
However, cooler objects (like comets) don’t emit as much light so radio astronomers rely on “absorption lines”, which is accomplished by transmitting a radio signal to the object and analyzing what is reflected back. Again, this allows them to determine material composition.
In the case of this article, astronomers transmitted a signal in the radio spectrum (radar) and analyzed what came back to see absorption lines. That’s it.
So, unfortunately, this is rather mundane, and if you’re expecting, due to the misleading headline, that the comet is transmitting a Rush Limbaugh show to us to let us know it’s conservative, you are going to be sorely disappointed.
By the way, RADAR is actually and acronym - RAdio Detect And Receive.
They want to talk to us about our car warranty.
Did they check with Dr. Kim Kardashian?
It isn’t an ‘it’ that is going to ‘do’ something. In some regards ‘it’ is almost the opposite of that. No signal. Arguably a LACK of signal. The sun emits light from low frequency radio waves to deep, deep ultraviolet with occasional bursts of x and gamma rays. That light bounces off of things and, shocker, that’s how we see them. In this case, the comet-like body is outgassing OH (as these things ALL do) and OH happens to absorb light of a particular frequency. So a radio telescope sees the *absence* of signal at these particular radio frequencies and says, “hey, look, there’s some OH.”
That’s your ‘signal’. Now, please, you tell me. What do *you* thinks it’s gonna do?
Klaatu barada nikto
Is that you Gary Seven? You didn’t bring that damned cat did you?
So assume it’s an order of magnitude more, or less, dense with zero evidence to make that assumption and draw a bunch of unfounded conclusions based on that. That’s a plan!
Where you don’t have direct data you make the most reasonable assumption available to you. That’s the one they made.
yep, so far 3 interstellar visitors (that we know about) have came truckin through. All had different characteristics, so our human knowledge is limited, so lets just scream ALIENS!!
“OH molecules” can refer to the hydroxyl group (a covalent group, \(-OH\)), the hydroxide ion (\(OH^{-}\), a charged ion), or the hydroxyl radical (\(\cdot OH\), a neutral, highly reactive molecule).
The hydroxyl group is a functional group found in organic molecules like alcohols and carboxylic acids.
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“Given that the anti-tail jets are only stopped at about 620,000 miles, their ram pressure exceeds that of the solar wind by a factor of a million,” Loeb noted.
“The solar wind flows at roughly 250 miles per second, a 1000 times faster than the outflow speed expected from a natural comet.”
“This implies a mass flux of about 2.2 million pounds per second per million-square-mile section of the jet, adding up to a mass loss of 50 billion tons per month,” Loeb said.
“Summing over the full area of the jets, the total ejected mass is comparable to the minimum mass of 3I/ATLAS itself.”
“Assuming a solid density of 0.5 grams per cubic centimeter, the object must be at least 3 miles across, and if most of its nucleus survived perihelion, it could be 6 miles or larger,” Loeb added.
“The extreme scale of 3I/ATLAS’s jets raises fundamental questions. If the object were a natural comet, the jets should move much more slowly and require months to reach the observed distances.”
“Instead, the extraordinary mass, density, and collimation of the outflows suggest something unusual may be happening.”
“The numbers are challenging for a natural comet explanation,” Loeb said. “The required mass loss, the rapid perihelion brightening, and the size all point to anomalies.”
“3I/ATLAS is giving us a rare opportunity to study an interstellar object in real time,” Loeb said.
“The combination of radio and optical data shows it is shedding massive amounts of material, moving at incredible speeds, and behaving in ways that challenge our understanding of natural comets.”
“as it moves closer to Earth”
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At it’s closest point, it will be 168 million miles from Earth. That’s 1.8 times the distance between the Sun and the Earth.
*its* above.
That is my perspective of people with Google glasses and smart watches. They’ve been assimilated into the digital collective and live in the social media hive mind.
Avoid!
Because it is so smart to expend two thrusts at 90 degrees to each other.
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