The answer is no. Just no.

Really, we could just end it there.  You may, however, have seen headlines like my clicky-bait title popping up in your news feeds.  Since I’m a guy who studies aliens for a living, I wanted to unpack what’s going with those stories and what the science really says.

The object that’s making all the news is 3I/ATLAS.  It’s the 3^rd time astronomers have discovered something clearly not of our solar system passing through our solar system.  We know 3I/ATLAS is not from the solar ‘hood because of its trajectory.  It’s not gravitationally bound to the Sun and will soon be heading back out into deep space. 

So, whatever kind of thing 3I/ATLAS is, it must come from another star many light-years away. That’s pretty awesome on its own but things get more awesome.  Enough data has now been gathered to answer the “what-is-it” question.   

3I/ATLAS is an alien comet from an alien solar system.  We know this because as it’s gotten closer to the Sun, we see it surrounded by a diffuse glow called a coma.  Comets are basically mountain-sized muddy iceballs left over from the assembly of planets early in a solar system’s history.  When comets heat up (because they get closer to a star) ice at the their surface boils away creating the glowing coma.  We’ve also, just recently, seen evidence for water and other compounds in the coma making the “3I/ATLAS = icy comet” identification even stronger. 

So why all the headlines about 3I/ATLAS as an alien spaceship? 

The answer to that question comes in a single name: Avi Loeb.  Loeb is a professor of astrophysics at Harvard, and he is the one generating all the speculation.  Nobody other than Loeb is pushing the spaceship thing.  For professional astronomers it's beyond frustrating because the real story is getting lost in the noise.

So, what’s up with Prof Loeb?  I wish I knew.

Avi Loeb has had a long, distinguished career working in domains like the study of black holes and the early Universe.  I always had a lot of respect for his ideas.  He was also one of the early pioneers of the field called Technosignatures (it's the modern version of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence or SETI). That’s where much of my work happens these days. When I was getting started in Technosignatures eight years ago, I talked with Prof. Loeb a number of times. I always found him to be a kind and generous person.  So, I, like many other astronomers, have been baffled and saddened by where he’s gone these last few years.  

Generally, we researchers hold fast to the methods and norms of scientific practice that have been carefully established over the last four centuries.  Self-criticism, patience and a willingness to listen to others with more experience than yourself are hallmarks of that practice.  For reasons I don’t understand, Prof Loeb seems to have turned away from that.  It feels like he has gotten stuck in his own biases (i.e. intelligent life is everywhere) and it leads him to ignore evidence that doesn’t fit that bias.  This includes blowing off the expertise of people who have a way better handle on sub-fields (like cometary astronomy) than he does.  Worse, he seems to have gotten lost in the media glare (which I know is pretty seductive). Whatever the reasons, the claims he makes in interview after interview distort the story of 3I/ATLAS and make it difficult for hard-working astronomers to get the results of their hard work across. 

Right now all the evidence points strongly to 3I/ATLAS being a comet - one born billions of years ago in the mayhem of planetary creation surrounding a far distant star.  There is so much to learn from it because it DOES look different in interesting ways from the comets in our solar system. So, while I do hope that one day we will see an alien spaceship passing through the solar system, for me 3I/ATLAS as an alien comet is reason enough for awe and wonder.

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— Adam Frank 🚀