Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Avi Loeb's WARNING: Watch Out for THIS When 3i/ATLAS Nears The Sun!

Episode Date: November 1, 2025

Win EXTRATERRESTRIAL METAL - a real meteorite💥 enter at briankeating.com/yt 💥 What happens when 3I/ATLAS dives toward the Sun? One signature could expose interstellar origins, hidden composition, and non-gravitational forces at play. Loeb pinpoints what to watch: abrupt brightening vs. erosion, outgassing asymmetry, and dust-to-gas shifts that defy textbook comets. If it flares the “wrong” way, the implications are seismic—on formation models, radiation-driven activity, even interstellar visitors. Miss this, and you’ll miss the moment the solar corona turns a mystery object into a lab experiment. Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb joins me to discuss the latest revelations about interstellar object 3I/ATLAS as it makes its closest approach to Mars. From HiRISE images to unusual chemistry, polarization anomalies, and even a potential link to the Wow! Signal, this conversation explores whether 3I/ATLAS is a natural comet or a possible technological artifact. Along the way, we cover censorship from Galileo to today’s UAP debates, the “Sputnik moment” of interstellar objects, and what a global response might look like. Follow Avi on Medium https://avi-loeb.medium.com ⏱️ Timestamps 00:00 — October 2025 A Month of Cosmic Chaos Opening monologue summarizing multiple sky events and why 3I ATLAS matters. 01:44 — Avi Loeb Returns to Into the Impossible Warm intro, recap of Joe Rogan appearance, setup for anomalies discussion. 03:16 — Brian Cox vs Avi Loeb The Comet Debate Cox’s tweet calling 3I ATLAS entirely natural and Loeb’s rebuttal begins. 05:34 — Science Is Not a Popularity Contest Loeb contrasts commentators like Cox with frontline researchers guided by data. 06:56 — Orbital Anomalies Too Perfect to Be Random Discussion of 3I ATLAS’s ecliptic alignment and fine-tuned planetary flybys. 07:58 — Strange Chemistry Nickel Without Iron and the Sunward Tail The anti-tail phenomenon and odd metallic ratios have never been seen in other comets. 10:12 — Perihelion The Acid Test for 3I ATLAS Loeb explains the physics of perihelion and what would happen if the object maneuvered. 16:37 — Inside the Galileo Project New Sky Surveillance Details on infrared arrays atop the Las Vegas Sphere and triangulation methods. 28:03 — Black Swan Science Why Low Odds Still Matter Loeb’s argument for studying rare but civilization-shifting possibilities. 36:38 — The Anti-Tail and What It Means for Physics Deep dive into Hubble data, optical geometry, and jet dynamics toward the Sun. 49:11 — Loeb’s Five Sigma Test for Alien Tech What evidence would confirm artificial origin maneuvers, radio, and radar imaging? 1:19:53 — Trojan Horse or Cosmic Gift Loeb’s Final Warning Philosophical close Pascal’s Wager applied to the extraterrestrial contact risk. Links • Channel membership (Office Hours): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join • Book: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu (https://a.co/d/03ezQFu) • Memoir: Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA (http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamavat Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21 to enter. October 2025, we'll go to. out in history as one of the most active months in astronomical history. From the appearance of two naked-eye visible comets, to the appearance of a mini-moon shadowing the earth, to the close

approach of three-eye atlas, to the sun, to the claimed discovery of evidence pointing to a possible discovery of alien artifacts lurking in archival footage from the Mount Palomar Sky Survey from the 1950s, years before Sputnik was even launched. This month is unrivaled in terms astronomical appearances. Adding so much to our conversation in the public and in scientific communities is my friend, Professor Avi Lope, Director of the Galileo Project, Professor at Harvard, and all-around advocate for astronomical adventures. Avi is tireless from his appearance just this past week on the Joe Rogan experience for the second time to his advocacy for Congress to loosen up the funding to protect and study these interstellar interlopers. Avi's unrivaled, and he gets a lot of

negative feedback and hostility directed his way. We'll discuss that, some sniping that has been done towards him, and where do we go from here and our understanding of these mysterious objects, most notably Three-E-E-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-LB. Welcome back to the Inton Impossible Podcast. How are you, my friend? I'm doing great. A lot of things are happening. I walk up at 1 a.m. today, so it's sort of late in the day for me. Well, it's a special day for many reasons. I like to say that you're on the Joe Rogan experience yesterday or your episode came out yesterday. So that'll be, this will be, you know, that episode will be your second most popular episode this week.

I'm sure after this one, right, Avi? Let's make it that one, yeah? So we're going to talk about a lot of things today. We're going to talk about the anomalies that just seem to keep compounding, growing like the national debt, this iceberg of cash, but it's an iceberg of who knows what. maybe you know what, the 3-Ey Atlas is really, I mean, I've been so impressed by how you've been humble about this object because without you, I claimed on Twitter recently that no one would even care about this object. Now we're hearing about spacecraft that might be redirected.

We're hearing about, you know, people in Congress that want to pursue it, perhaps. We'll talk about all of that. We'll take questions from the audience as well. You have to be a subscriber, by the way, to the channel, at least. channel members get special, special advanced, you know, kind of advanced priority on this. So it's joining the channel for 99 cents a month. It's a very small amount of money. But otherwise, if you want to ask a question, I will take it from the audience as well. And that'll come up later.

But first, I'm going to start with a rather obsteparous tweet that I did see today, which came from a man, you know, by the name of Brian. Not me. He does spell it the same way. And it's Brian Cox, who today just wrote. the following. Just to be clear, Avi, he wrote, given recent drivel online, comet three-eye Atlas, is a comet made of carbon dioxide and water ices, and bits of other stuff, it's entirely natural, Avi, in origin, its orbit is as expected, and in a whiz around the sun and disappear into the

galaxy again. If it ever encounters another inhabited system, I hope they're more sensible than us, I don't know who he's speaking for. Not me, certainly. And I hope they'll enjoy it for what it is. A visitor from elsewhere, a pristine lump of rock and ice, isn't that wonderful enough? So I won't tell you how I respond. I did invite him on, but of course he ignored me. But Avi, what is going on?

What is your reaction to this rather provocative tweet from another Brian, but not me? Brian Cox. Well, if we ever imagine a cave dweller finding a sense. cell phone. The cave dweller would say it's a rock of a type that I've never seen before. That's pretty much the response of Brian Cox. Moreover, he is not a practicing astrophysicist. He is just expressing what sounds to him as the most likely explanation. But he's trying to be popular, is trying to not deviate from what people think based on traditional knowledge. And the thing about doing science at the frontier, actually being a practitioner,

is that you allow yourself not to know the answer. You are guided by data. And if there are anomalies, you ask questions. You don't give answers. You ask questions. Why do we have these anomalies? He does not ask these questions. So the analogy I would make is that he is a commentator, okay?

And myself, I am an actual player on the field. You know, imagine a soccer match and I'm playing on the soccer field. And he sits on the bench and comments about what he thinks the play is about. And the point is he will never score a goal because he's not playing on the field. And that's what makes the difference between a practicing scientist speaking on a subject of research and someone who comments on the research as if he tries to represent the most popular view. And science is not decided by popular views. We know that for many centuries, it's decided by evidence.

And the evidence shows eight anomalies of three-A Atlas, and we just need to try and explain them. And if we can't, we should admit it. So when Brian says the trajectory is a very common trajectory, not true because the previous two interstellar objects came at a large angle relative to the ecliptic plane of the planets around the sun. And this one came within five degrees of that plane and planets are usually misaligned with that plane to within a few degrees. So it's as aligned with a plane as the planets are. And the question is why. And someone suggested, oh, maybe because it's coming from the disk of the Milky Way galaxy. But the disk of the

Milky Way galaxy is misaligned by 60 degrees relative to the ecliptic plane. So that's not a good explanation. Another explanation that people suggested is that maybe we are looking only in the plane. The answer is no, we discovered Omoor, more we discovered Borisov. They came at a large angle. This object is actually much bigger than they were by at least an order of magnitude. So it's much brighter. The surface area is 100 times bigger than the others.

And so it's so bright that you could have seen it coming from any direction. And the fact that we found it in the plane, the clitic plane, is surprising. The chance of that happening at random is one in a few hundred. So you can't just say it's a common trajectory. And then the timing of its arrival to Mars and then Venus and Jupiter allows it to come within tens of millions of kilometers from those planets. When they move around the sun with an orbit that is hundreds of millions of kilometers. So that also requires some fine-tuning. And in addition, there were some other anomalies.

We saw nickel with very little iron, never seen before in other comets. And we have seen a glow pointing towards the sun from this object rather than away from the sun, the way we see in comets. Again, never seen before. I mean, we do have optical illusions when there is a perspective of the,

observing a comet from the earth gives us the illusion that there is a comet headed towards, that there is a tail headed towards the sun. But we've never seen a comet where a physical extension of the tail was actually an antitail, was pointed at the sun. And in this case, there is no ambiguity because we saw it at a large distance when the Hubble Space Telescope imaged this object back in July, 21st. And then more recently, of course, during the month of September, the antitale is turning into a tail. So it would be really interesting to get a hold of the image. The best image we have is actually

from the high-rise camera on board the Mars reconnaissance orbiter. That image was taken on October 2nd, 2025. And in fact, it was a set of images, maybe four. They were not released because that was one day after the government shutdown and NASA claims that they are not working and therefore they cannot release that data, this image should be three times sharper than the image from the Hubble Space Telescope, the best one we had so far, just because the object was very close to the high-rise camera. And I, you know, it's already almost a month since the image was taken and I was corresponding with Representative Anna Paolina Luna today. and she promised to reach out to NASA in a message.

Very graciously, she will try to convince them to release the data, at least to the scientific community. It doesn't need to be a press release that NASA authorizes. The data exists in the hands of scientists. For example, at the University of Arizona, and they are not affiliated with NASA. So I very much hope we will see that image because it will give us also,

aside from the pixel size of things, 30 kilometers, it will give us a side view of the glow around the Triadlas because it was moving towards the side of Mars as it was headed closer to the sun. Today, the special day to days that it's closest to the sun and we can't see it because it's hiding behind the sun relative to us. So let's take a step back and examine what that means. So you have a wonderful article I recommend it to everyone. I'll link it in the description called the acid test of 3-I Atlas. And this is why we're talking today, right? You're talking about perihelian. First of all, for those that aren't familiar, describe perihelian, apahelian, and what would happen to an object

if it was a comet as Brian Cox confidently asserts? He calls it comet three-eye Atlas, which nobody calls it, right? Nobody calls it comet. They call it three-eye Atlas. It's a third interstellar object. Discovered by the Atlas program, a small telescope, half-meter-car cross. You can buy it commercially online. But Avi, tell me what would happen if it is a comet and what we expect to see and when might we expect to see anything when it emerges from behind the sun. So first of all, what's perihelian for the non-experts? What types of effects occur on comets and on meteorites or other objects or technology around such a time as perihelian?

Right. So I should clarify what a comet is. A comet is a rock that is covered with ice that evaporates when it comes close to the sun. and then you see some dust and gas around it that gets pushed away from the sun by the solar radiation pressure and the solar wind. And for example, the first interstellar object was also called a comet.

It was Omoa-Mua back in 2017, and we didn't see any gas or dust around it. And so the experts, the comet experts, called it a comet, then they realized there is no evidence for a comet. So then they called it a dark comet, a comet where you don't see the signature of a comet, which is an oxymoron actually. So it's not surprising that they would call anything a comet. It doesn't matter whether it has a tail, a cloud of dust or gas. They will always call it a comet.

So I, you know, I just ignore what they say in terms of the label they assign because it doesn't inform us about the nature of the object. Now, a natural comet, a gets heated by the sun. And then if it comes very close to the sun, then can break up because it's glued together by ice. And you can have fragments of it flying out of it. And they have a larger surface area than the original nucleus of the comet.

And as a result, it's a runaway process by which they absorb more heat and they break up even more. So you can imagine some fireworks. Some comets show fireworks as they come close to the sun and they evaporate much more quickly and they might actually disintegrate. So it would be really interesting to see if something with that happens in the case of 3a Atlas. Now, the claim is it's made mostly of carbon dioxide. Well, in that case, carbon dioxide is much more volatile than water ice. And so whatever we see in terms of fireworks around the water-rich comets, which are the most common type of comets in the solar.

system. These are just dirty iceball. And I should mention that Fred Whipple, who was actually at the Harvard College Observatory at the time, he went to Harvard Square on a winter day and noticed the students throwing ice balls at each other. And he realized, oh, maybe he was the first one to recognize that maybe comets are just dirty ice balls based on his experience at Harvard square. And so indeed they are made of rock and the water ice very often in the solar system. But this one, we see that the gas around it is made mostly of carbon dioxide, 87% by mass, and 9% is carbon monoxide and only 4% is water. So in that case, it should have evaporated very quickly as it comes close to the sun and we should see potentially disintegrating. That's

That's in the case of a natural comet, natural object, made of carbon dioxide. And that would obviously tell us that it's natural. However, if it's artificial, if, for example, the nickel that we see without iron around it implies that it's a nickel alloy that was manufactured industrially, the way we manufacture the surfaces of spacecraft, in that case, of course, it could survive without anything unusual happening to it, then nothing dramatic will change, except that it may use the closest approach to the sun, which is perihelion. So perihelion is the point along the path, which is closest to the sun. So if the path is carved just by gravity, it represents the midpoint

of the passage of the object through the solar system, because the trajectory is symmetric. The object enters the solar system and then comes out in a symmetry. metric pattern around the sun. And so the point of closest approach is the half point of the entire history of the passage of the object through the solar system. And if it's technological, it may not be the end, it may not be half of the path because it could break, for example, or it can accelerate. And the best time to perform a maneuver is actually when it's moving fastest, because then

you apply the thrust either in the direction of motion, so you get the boost, the largest boost that you can get, or opposite to the direction of motion, and you get a slowdown, a reduction in the kinetic energy. And in both cases, that's the optimal point of doing it. At perihelion, we use it for gravitational assist by a massive object like the sun with our spacecraft. So if it's technological, it might actually slow down or speed up, depending on the plan. or it might release mini-proves that do that, because even for them, it's beneficial, energetically speaking, to do the maneuver

just when they are closest to the sun. So that's what we should be looking for. And I should say the Galileo project that I'm leading, established three observatories, monitoring the vicinity of Earth for any anomalous objects. And I told the research team to search in the coming months if there is any unusual In fact, one of the observatories was just constructed over the summer, summer 2025.

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deprioritization during times of high network usage. And it's on top of the sphere in Las Vegas. I announced it at the Joe Rogan podcast. This is an amazing place. You know, it's a sphere that is a 130 meters high and we went all the way to the top of it and now it has a freckle on top of it, which is our array of cameras looking at the entire sky for any. anomalous objects and we have two copies of that array that observatory located 10 kilometers away so we are able to triangulate to look at an object in the sky from different directions and figure out its distance its velocity its acceleration and ask whether those lie within the performance envelope of human-made technologies so if we see anything unusual you will know about it

I also encouraged in my exchange with Representative Luna today, I encourage NASA to check what is happening on Mars. I mean, they have cameras on the rovers, like the Perseverance rover, and also they have the high-rise camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. So those can be used to monitor Mars and see if there is any unusual activity there as well. Hey everybody, I'm usually the one that asks my guest to judge their books by their covers, But today I'm asking myself to judge my own book by its cover. My newest book, Focus Like a Nobel Prize winner, is chartful of advice, life tips,

and focus and productivity tips from nine of the world's greatest minds. Nobel laureates ranging from economics to peace to physics, of course. It launches September 9th, which is also my birthday. I hope we'll check it out. And my publisher's got an Amazon to run a special, just for listeners of the Into the Impossible podcast. You can get the Kindle edition for only 9th. 99 cents. That plus than a new pocket protector. So go to Amazon and get the Kindle copy today because this special only lasts for the first week after launch. Okay. So I want to know the

solar flux that you talk about is about 770 watts per square meter. Is that enough to vaporize, you know, kind of the weak volatiles, the ice and so forth on top of a normal comet? Let's give Brian Cox, you know, the benefit of the doubt, although I said, you know, he wouldn't maybe give it to us. But let's say it is Comet, 3-Ey Atlas. Nobody calls it that but him. Would it do something interesting? Was that level of solar irradiance?

Is that enough to vaporize weak icees? Oh, definitely, because that's inside the orbit of Mars around the sun. And we know that, you know, Mars had liquid water on its surface early on, and obviously it lost its atmosphere. So all of that evaporated. So that means Mars is a desert as a result of all the ice. that was exposed to sunlight evaporating. So obviously something within the orbit of Mars will do the same for water ice.

But here we are dealing with carbon dioxide, which is even more volatile than water ice. And so I would expect significant enhancement in the evaporation rate for carbon dioxide ice. So you mentioned the potential of mini-probes. I mean, everybody loves to talk about that, Avi. I mean, the New York Post to Joe Rogan is a really thrilling thing to contemplate. And between the last live stream we did in early October, when it was closest to Mars and then today when it's closest to the sun, you know, there's been this paper by Beatriz Villa Royale, who's agreed to come on my podcast. Maybe we'll get you to join at the same time. In the coming week, she's kind of burned out.

She told me from all the media exposure she's getting, which is well deserved. But these are, you know, kind of reports of glints of objects that are kind of like maybe mini-probs, maybe not so miniature in the 1950s pre-Spotnick. What are the observables? Are they optical flares? Are they glints? Are they infrared excesses? What would you see if there were technological breadcrumbs, as you call them?

What would you expect to see and how could our audience, you know, kind of understand what sorts of signatures would be differentiated from just normal volatiles breaking apart? and stuff like that, normal commentary behavior? Well, if you see objects as satellites of Earth, there weren't any satellites that were human made back in the 1950s until Sputnik was launched and therefore it would be clear indication of technologies that humans did not develop yet. However, I should caution that the only way to be sure

that something like that existed is to observe it, from two different telescopes because it may be, I mean, from one telescope you might have some artifacts. In particular, we're talking about the photographic plates and you could have defects in those plates that would appear as a glint or as spots of light, but they are not real. And then, you know, these defects might be even clustered,

might be sensitive to the level of illumination. So in principle, you might have more overlap of those with the shadow of the earth. That is one method that was proposed by Beatriz to identify real object if they don't glint when they are in the shadow of the earth. But you could have within the plates, you can have clusters of defects that would give you statistical significance to that has nothing to do with the sky. It has to do with the plate itself. So we have to be careful about that. And the only convincing clue that I would definitely believe without, with no doubt, is if we had the two separate observatory seeing

the same object in the sky at the same time. So in addition to the Palomar plates, there is also a collection of the Harvard College Observatory plates. And that was digitized actually. And I did speak with the person who digitized it Josh Grindley today and a week ago. And we are planning to check if the same type of objects that were reported appeared in these plates as well. We know the time. We know the coordinates, so we can check that. That would be conclusive evidence as far as I'm concerned. Otherwise, there would be always suspicious that there might be some defects in the photographic plates that are difficult to model because these are all technologies. And you know, my approach in general is not to rely on past reports, but instead collect data

that is verifiable with present-day instruments that are far better than we had back in the 1950s. The complication is that human-made objects are more abundant now in space, so we need to differentiate them. But that's why we have machine learning, artificial intelligence that allows us to filter out familiar objects that are human-made, and especially not just in terms of their appearance, but also in terms of their trajectory. And that's what we are doing with the Galileo project, observatory, especially the observatory in Las Vegas, that would be a state of the art and extremely interesting to use. Why was it put there? I mean, I wouldn't think for light pollution reasons I'd put anything optical there, but it must be looking for things other than visible

light spectrum and signatures there. Yes. So we are using an array that is sensitive to the infrared and we actually tested it and we that can be used at nighttime and we found that there is not much light pollution for that array of cameras. So we are already have, we are analyzing data and we are expecting a few million objects per year that we will examine. And we could in principle figure out, even if there is one that happens to be outside the performance envelope of human-made objects, we will be able to find it. Altogether, I'm doing this because even if we don't find any extraterrestrial technological object,

the techniques that we are developing in terms of sensors, in terms of the machine learning software that we use to analyze the data, those can be used by the Department of War for national security purposes. So it will never be wasted. Whatever we learn can be used to search for human-made objects like drones that, of course, are an issue for the Defense Department. And we need to develop better tools than were used in the past. So when we look at the potentiality to differentiate between the volatile gases, things breaking apart, I mean, this is such a crucial time because it's getting so close to the sun. and that's when the maximum activity would occur for a normal object.

But as you said, it could have these features, you know, it could, you know, potentially, although you put out, you know, I have to ask you, you know, did you convince Harvard to divest their endowment yesterday? Did you personally take any activities like you claim that might be prudent to do with your portfolio? Did you do anything yesterday? No, so I'm very much of the opinion that this kind of situation is very different than what you encounter, usually in the context of science. Because suppose you are searching for B mode polarization

from cosmic inflation, just as a random example. Okay? And suppose you detect it, there are no implications to the person on the street in terms of their daily life. But if we are dealing with a visitor to our backyard, like a three-eye Atlas, and it happens to be technological, even if you assign a very small likelihood for that to happen,

implications would be huge. And that means that we have to consider that possibility. That is well known within the intelligence agencies. These are called black swan events. These are events that have small probability, but a huge impact on society. And therefore, they must be considered. And actually, there are protocols and scenarios for such events. And that's why it costs so much a trillion dollars a year in the defense budget for 2026 because you have to deal with a lot of risks that have low probability but you must collect a lot of data in order to figure out whether they are real or not. And so that happens all the time. We are putting a lot of money into risk assessments that end up not being a risk eventually. And in the same way that when scientists are investing $10 billion

in the large Hadron Collider and we don't find supersymmetry, you know, we just move. on, nobody would say it was a waste of effort or money. And the same is true about the intelligence agencies, finding scenarios that do not materialize, but they at least had checked and avoided the risk that the society otherwise would not be prepared for. Now, this situation with a visitor from interstellar space is that kind of an event.

It's an event that has a huge, potentially, a huge impact on humanity, and therefore, we cannot agree. ignore the possibility that we are being visited by a technological object. Even if you say the probability is small, you know, you can't as a scientist say, I will just abide by the most likely scenario. And even if there is a 10% chance that is something else, I would prefer to stick with a 90% because then I don't risk my reputation.

Well, it's not about your reputation. It's about the future of humanity. Okay. So if there is a 10% chance of it being something different than a rock, We should invest huge resources just to figure out that it's a rock, just to make sure, and we should not speak about it as a rock before we have the full evidence. It's not about preserving our image, being correct, showing off as if we know the answer in advance without much data. It's not about that. It's exactly the opposite.

We want to be absolutely sure using all our assets to figure out the answer. And by the way, just before I joined you, I did a very interesting calculation because I have interviews non-stop right now. And one of the interviews asked me, would it be possible to image three-eye atlas with a radar system? And in fact, we used radars to image asteroids that came close to Earth. And I did a simple calculation that the flux of reflected radio waves from an object scales as the diameter squared of the object, that's the area of the object. And the inversely, with distance to the fourth power because there is a one over distance square change in the flux impinging on the object if you transmit it from earth and then another one over distance squared

for the flux that you detect bouncing off the object so altogether one over distance to the fourth and i calculated that in fact three eye atlas is right now or you know over the past week would have been within 50 million kilometers from Earth if Earth was at the point where it used to be six months ago or will be six months from now. So on the opposite side of its trajectory, at that distance of 50 million kilometers, we could have used existing radar systems to image Three-Ey Atlas. In other words, measure its size directly and also get an image of it as it rotates every 16. 16 hours. So it rotates every 16 hours and we could have seen a three-dimensional map of how it looks if we only could have been six months ago at the point where three Atlas is right now. And the unfortunate fact is that it avoided us. And the question is whether that was on purpose

because we would have solved all mysteries by having an image of three Atlas if we only were six months Back in time. Well, you, you, I mean, you're too humble to admit it, perhaps, but you were, you know, you've been highlighting the importance of this for the better part of this year. I mean, we first started talking about it, you know, briefly early, you know, late in the spring, you know, of 2025. That was plenty of time. And you had the ear of, you know, Congresswoman Luna and Burkett and other people. I did try to get them on the show today. They, you know, they're busy. I don't know what they're doing, you know, with our non-existent tax dollars as the government is shut down, which I claimed last time was the ninth anomaly. You know, you're a sandbagging it, obviously. You only talk about eight

anomaly. Add in the fact that the aliens knew that the government would be shut down in America. We couldn't have an ask. I should say, I should say that it's not a sign of extraterrestrial intelligence. The shutdown is a sign of terrestrial stupidity. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. That's right. And so, yeah, they're probably wisely, if they're smart, they'd be ignoring us and avoiding us. But let's talk about that. The trajectory of this object is hugging the ecliptic. It's threading close to Venus, Earth, and Jupiter and Mars, as you said. What is the coincidence? What's the probability of this object or have any other objects done this?

Even normal comets, Avi. Forget about it. Let's, again, let's assume Brian, the other Brian is right, Brian Cox. And it's just comet three eye Atlas. Avi, how many comets do what comet three eye Atlas has done? Very few. So first of all, only one in 500 would come on a retrograde trajectory that is within five degrees of the ecliptic plane. So because the comets originate, well, at least the long period comets are coming from the ore cloud, which is roughly spherical around the sun. And that means they come in all directions. So one in 500 will come as close to the ecliptic on a retrograde orbit like this one. And then there is the timing.

It needs to come at the right time, at the right place to the vicinity of Mars, Venus, and Jupiter. Now, some people say, well, it avoided the earth. But I see that as a signal because maybe it did it for a reason. But at any event, just to come so close to three planets requires a chance in 20,000. That's based on the fact that the orbit of those planets around the sun, you know, is spanning a much larger distance. So for them to be within tens of millions of kilometers from Triathlas when it's there requires a very, you know, fine-tuned trajectory. So, you know, that's another peculiarity of this object, and it will never go away. So it doesn't matter what Brian Cox says.

I should also say that, you know, we can maintain our ignorance by saying we know everything even though there are anomalies, but this is the recipe for not learning something new. And, you know, whether we have a neighbor or not does not depend on what we say about the neighbor. You know, just think about yourself living on a street and you tell your family members, that you don't have a neighbor. Does that matter? No, the neighbor exists irrespective what you tell your family members. So it's really not really helpful for us to say, we know the answer in advance, therefore we shouldn't, you know, talk about additional alternatives because it makes us lazy. We are not collecting as much data as we can. And one thing I should say is that since the last time we spoke, I wrote a white paper to the United Nations, as well as to the International Astronomical Union, encouraging them to establish a committee

that would coordinate observations of objects like 3i Atlas, collect as much data as possible and inform policymakers, politicians. And two weeks after I submitted this white paper to the United Nations, an organization that is associated, affiliated with the United Nations, called the International Asteroid Warning Network, IWAN. They issued an announcement, by which they said that they are coordinating a campaign to get as much data as possible about the motion of 3i Atlas between November 27th and January 27th. So that would be really fantastic.

I salute this initiative because as far as I'm concerned, the biggest crime we can commit is not collect as much evidence, as much data as we can, given all the assets that we have Because this is a gift from interstellar space. You know, it comes in the ecliptic plane, spends months a long time close to observatories that we have. So we will never have such an amazing opportunity. This is a random trajectory, you know, by some natural comet. Why would it come close to planets where we have orbiters?

Why would it come in the ecliptic plane? So it spends a lot of time close to in a relative, to our observatories. Talk about the anti-tail, because that was relatively new, and that was completely unexpected. I mean, if you also add upon, you know, kind of surprise, paradox, anomaly upon anomaly, yes, it's circumstantial, but enough circumstantial evidence can be used to convict. So let me ask you this question. Antitale. What do you make of that and how anomalous, how unusual is that? I heard, you know, from commentary, quote-unquote experts. It's funny because you are the nexus of all these people that study, you know, biosignatures, techno signatures,

comets, minor planets, exosolar planets, exo moons. And they're all basically, you know, kind of riding your commentary coattails, I should say, or they all get really interested in this, but they never predict or pre-sage or pre-empt what you're going to say. So they're very reactive and maybe that's fun for you. I don't know. But then the anti-tail, I mean, that really must have flummoxed people besides you. So it's not a perspective. effect. It's not a matter of our geometry. First of all, what is it, Avi? Explain to the audience that might not be. What's an anti-tail? What's a tail?

So the reason it's called anti-tail is because a cometary tale usually points away from the sun because the dust and gas gets pushed by the solar radiation pressure and the solar wind away from the sun. So there is a force acting that resists the motion of

those dust particles and gas particles while the nucleus of the comet continues unhinged and it just has much more mass perinitaria. So it's just like a bullet moving through, but then the gas and dust gets pushed behind it away from the sun. And therefore we should always see a tail pointed away from the sun. Sometimes the earth is at a vantage point where the perspective gives us the falling false impression of an optical illusion as if there is a tale towards the sun. So people reported situations like that, but that was just a matter of perspective. And for all the comments that I know about, there is always, obviously for the physical reason

of the sun pushing the material away from it, it was always extended away from the sun relative to the nucleus where it's coming from. However, for three-eye Atlas, during July and August, it seemed like there is a glow that is pointed towards the sun. And it was like a jet. In fact, the Hubble image was twice elongated in the direction of the sun. But we looked at this elongation almost head on. So if you think of a cigar, we were looking almost along the long axis of the cigar. So it was actually a jet that was 10 times longer than it was wide.

And we just saw it from a perspective of the edge of it because the misalignment between the direction of the sun and the direction of the observation from Earth was just 10 degrees at that time. That was back in July 21st when the Hubble image was taken. So what was the reason for this jet 10 times longer than it is white towards the sun? Of course, the folklore of people who work on comets is to just ignore it and say,

well, there are lots of peculiarities of comets. We don't need to understand it. So I wrote two scientific papers with Eric Kito trying to explain the physics behind it. And the standard approach that is taken by people who don't do any calculation is to claim, oh, these might be dust particles that are very big, let's say a millimeter or a tenth of a millimeter in size so that the surface area per unit mass is much smaller. These are big chunks of dust, not the tiny dust particles. The point to keep in mind is, in that case, they would not scatter sunlight very effectively

because to scatter sunlight, you basically need the particles with a size comparable to the wavelength of visible light, which is half a micrometer. And therefore, if you make particles of hundreds of micrometer, you know, they will not scatter very effectively. You will need to shed a huge amount of mass in those in order to get the same effectiveness in producing a glow of sunlight. And in my paper with Erykito, we proposed that, in fact,

there is not much dust, fine-grained dust, but it's mostly ice that is being shed off the object. And the ice fragments, they just eventually evaporate so they don't turn around. And that's why you see a jet pointed towards the sun from the sun facing side. As to the nature of the object, you know, don't, as you often say, don't judge a book by its cover. You know, what we see in terms of the ice evaporating from Three-E Atlas tells us about the skin of the object. I calculated that it's only a layer that is somewhere between a millimeter to a centimeter thick that was evaporated over the past five months.

So not much. And the object is five kilometers. Just think about the size of the palm of your hand compared to the size of Manhattan Island. That's roughly the... So from the thickness of the palm of your hand, you can't really tell what the rest of the object is made of. And we know that it's losing about 150 kilograms every second based on the web telescope data from August 6, 2025. and I calculated how much recoil the object may get. And it turns, we don't see any recoil of the object. It follows a perfectly consistent trajectory with the gravity alone, no non-gravitational acceleration. And for that to be the case, the object must be very massive.

And I calculated that it's at least 33 billion tons in mass. Or for solid density, it's about, at least, at least five kilometers in diameter. So that's a very massive object. That was the main issue that I had with the object being natural, because why didn't we see, I mean, it's a million times more massive than Omuamua. Why didn't we see a million objects like Omoa

before we see a giant one like this one? And what about the metal ratio uncertainty and how anomalous that is? Have we learned more since just this? I mean, it's fascinating. And again, everybody out there, Avi's got his haters. We all know that they're trolls. We don't want to feed the trolls, as I often say.

But Avi, everybody's interested in this from the metallurgical perspective, from the compositional perspective, from the kind of archaeo-astronical perspective. Obviously, techno signatures, all sorts of things. You're at the center of this firestorm. And, of course, you take it about yourself to go on the second most popular podcast after this one, The Into the Impossible. You go on to Joe Rogans yesterday. and you've got a race car with your likeness on it. But Avi, tell me, what have we learned in just a short amount of time, which, by the way, is completely unprecedented in my 30-year scientific career.

There's a little bit longer. You could be my cousin. You're a little bit older, but not much. But, Avi, this is unprecedented. The amount of information arriving about this object, I think it's 90% due to you. I mean, there's a lot of great scientists working on this problem. I don't want to minimize what they're doing. but the attention that you're getting to this object that it rightfully deserves should be a credit to you and you should be getting a lot of kudos.

You're not, but you're thick skin. But, Avi, what have we learned about like the composition, the metal ratios? Is it like these meteorites that people can win if they enter my Monday Magic mailing list at Briankeating.com slash YouTube or YT, rather? Please tell me, what have we learned about the composition compared to these meteorites, which I can give away to my audience? They're so interesting. Well, first of all, the existence of nickel or iron in the plume of gas around the comets is not well understood because the temperatures are not high enough to release these materials. But putting that aside, during the month of August, we detected mostly nickel, no iron.

there were actually upper limits on the iron. And that implied a very extreme nickel-to-iron ration, never seen before in comets. And the only place where we see that is in nickel alloys that are produced by our industries, partly for aerospace applications. And that is produced through the carbonyl channel pathway, where there is a process by which you,

isolate nickel from iron. And what was said by the authors of these papers is that this is really peculiar to see nickel without iron because usually they appear together. In fact, in the solar composition, there is more iron than nickel. And perhaps in nature there is a process similar to that the one we use in industries, the carbonyl pathway, maybe it operates in nature. So they are using what we know from our industries to argue that nature may employ the same process and say, okay, well, maybe this is the reason why we see nickel without iron. But to me, the argument is the only place we saw it is in the context of industrially produced nickel alloys.

Well, maybe it's technological in origin. I mean, at least it's an interesting hypothesis. And of course, Brian Cox is not even aware of that, I guess. And to me, it's all about the data, you know, the interpretation has to do with what we know. about the object. We have to learn from the data about the nature of the object. Even if it's natural, it would be really a peculiar natural object of a type that we've never seen before. So let's do the best we can to learn about it. I would also advocate a new frontier in astrobiology, which is to contemplate an intercept mission with future objects. We could have done it with

three-I Atlas. For example, the Juno spacecraft, if it carried the initial fuel that it had, It could have maneuvered right now so that it meets Tri-I Atlas when it comes closest to Jupiter on March 16th, 2026. Unfortunately, the Juno team used most of the fuel, so it can't do that. But that shows that it's feasible. If you detect an intercept our object early enough, you can intercept it. Another thing I love is that people start to complain, oh, Avi, that's unrealistic. We can't repurpose Juno to do this. But my idea is to purpose, you know, to look at an asteroid.

So in other words, but they wouldn't have thought of that is my claim without you kind of suggesting this. If we ever intercept an object like that, we can bring a sample back to Earth. And that to me is a new way to learn about the building blocks of life near other stars. Even if it's a rock, you know, we can study the materials that took millions to billions of years to arrive to our backyard. This is a rock that came from a neighbor's yard. Instead of just looking at the atmospheres of exoplanets trying to infer whether they have oxygen, methane, water, molecules at the cost of more than $10 billion, which is the current favorable plan, the highest priority of the astronomy community, to just look for these fingerprints.

I say here is a path for astrobiology that is completely different, which is to collect a sample from a rock that arrived to us from a distant star and check whether it has the building blocks of life as we know it, maybe even some microbes that survived. We have to look into that. And that was never contemplated before. And given the opportunity we see with three-eye Atlas, it may be feasible in the future. And at the cost of $10 billion, we might be able to do such a sample return mission. So it's just another path for astrobiology that was never thought about before. In addition to that, Avi, I have to say, you know, in particle physics and even in cosmology, we demand five sigma significance

before we declare something a discovery. My late, great colleague Hans Parr, used to joke, you know, at 3 Sigma, they'll invite you to do a lunch seminar. They may pay for lunch. You know, they may not. Four Sigma, you get to a colloquium and five sigma. You go to Stockholm. And you definitely get paid to do that.

So let me ask you this question. What would be the five sigma moment? I mean, what would it take to convince you and convince the world, you know, assuming that they're rational actors, that you're right. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day Day. deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill four-burner gas grill on special buy for only $199 and entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $499. This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the

Home Depot. While supplies last, price invalid May 14th or May 27th U.S. only exclusions apply. See homedepot.com slash price match for details. Yeah, it's very simple. Well, if we were six months ago closed within 50 million kilometers from Three Atlas. Right now, we could have imaged it with a radar system. We could have learned about its shape. And the shape would have told us as it rotates, whether it's technological or natural. But in addition, of course, if you have a camera

that you fly close to it, you can image it and that would be as good as the radar system. Finally, you know, the cleanest signal right now, for me, it would be a maneuver if it were to maneuver or emit a radio signal. So I got a confirmation after contacting radio observers. I got a confirmation yesterday that indeed they would allocate significant time and use major facilities to check for any radio transmission from 3A Atlas. And that, of course, reflects the fact that I noticed that the direction of the wow signal

from 1977 was within nine degrees of the arrival direction of Three-A Atlas. And in order to generate that signal, you know, from a distance of three light days or 600 times the Earth's sun separation, back in 1977, Three-A Atlas had to transmit a power, a radio power of about a gigawatt, which is roughly the power output of a nuclear reactor on Earth. So it's not outside the scope of technology, and especially when dealing with a spacecraft, that is at least five kilometers in size. You know, the biggest rocket that we produced is Starship, and Starship is less than 100 meters.

So we are very far from any prospect of launching an object that is at least five kilometers in size, and obviously we'll need to produce a lot of power on such a spacecraft. So the interesting question is whether there is any transmission. And again, it's not Brian Korn. who will tell us, it's actually the radio observers who will tell us. So, you know, I don't care about... I do want to, you know, come to the... Well, first of all, we're going to get to audience questions from members only. I'm going to try to parse my list here. But we've got,

you know, 5,000 people are watching right now, Abbey. And, you know, Joe Rogan, eat your heart out. But the kind of philosophy that I adopt is, you know, obviously the risk analysis kind of philosophy, which is one of, you know, avoiding making false alarms, but also not missing our next opportunity. So these go by the name of type 1 and type 2 errors. I want to ask you, you know, given the different weightings and consequently, you know, would you rather have cancer and be, you know, and be told you don't have cancer or, you know, not have cancer and be told you do have cancer, right? These are different types of errors. But getting ready for the next one. I mean, you and I have talked about, you know, two of these objects. There's only been three.

but only in the last, you know, five, six to seven years that we've really had our eyes open. We're going to see many, many more of these. Yeah. And you know, I... So what do we do next? What do we do next time? Are we going to talk to Musk? Are we going to talk to Congress?

Are we going to talk to NASA, Issa? Who are we going to talk to so that we don't have a Juno depletion of its fuel for maneuvering? What do we do next, Avi? What's on your dream list so that we don't make a type two? My hope is to speak to the president of the United States and inform. from policymakers of the potential risk, the chronological risk, also including Congress and, you know, make a plan. The plan would be to collect as much data as possible.

And right now we have the Rubin Observatory in Chile that monitors the southern sky. And at the cost of less than a billion dollars, we can build a copy that will monitor the northern sky. We need to cover both hemispheres. And that will be a warning system. If we ever detect a technological object coming from outside the solar system, then of course we can go to the next phase, which is to invest a trillion dollars a year in putting an alert system in the outer part of the solar system.

That means telescopes, observatories that are not on Earth, but out there that will warn us in advance, as well as interceptors. And with a trillion dollars a year, you know, which is a fraction of the global military budget, we can do that. But I don't anticipate that happening. I mean, the money exists, but it's not, it's allocated to military purposes right now. But once we realize there is a threat from outer space, we might allocate a significant fraction of the military budget to that task. And that would mean a factor of a thousand more investment than we currently have that we had in the Rubin Observatory and in fact every year perhaps. So I do see that this will become a major

issue for the future if we find after the first encounter, right? And the issue is let's make sure that I hope that the first blind date that we have with a technological object will not be with a serial killer. You know, that's really the hope that I have, that we will survive that first encounter only to learn the lesson of looking for similar objects later on. I should say that it's not only that there is a lot of interest in this subject in Washington or in the general public, I was surprised the day after the interview with Rogan, I was invited to a car race, the NASCAR car race in California. And I went there and one of the drivers there put my image, along with Three-Ey Atlas on the hood of his car. And he also showed me how to drive a race car,

which was a very interesting. They move really fast. But I told him, your car will never, you know, will always be at least 600 times slower than 3i Atlas. So for 3i Atlas, it's not a great compliment to have its image on a car that moves 600 times slower. Of course, my image for me was, you know, a great compliment. I should say it's a very different culture. You know, these are not people who are very much familiar with academic thinking. car race. The country boys.

This is my crowd. The country boys. They can survive. And I really enjoyed being in their company and learning how, you know, small changes in the shape, the aerodynamic shape of the car can make a huge difference in the race. And with me was the Netflix documentary team that follows me for more than three years now. And they hope to release their film in 2026. so you might be able to see actually the footage from that car race. Who's going to play you, Avi?

Who's playing you in the movie? I'm joking. I know it's you. I should say that I did meet Jerry Bruchheimer in an event. After I gave a talk, he came to me and said, you know, I just produced F1. And he, you know, and now I'm having the next project on scientists. seeking unidentified anomalous phenomena. So a few minutes after that, I met Adrian Brody.

And he told me that he was really excited about science at the young age, but ended up as an actor. And so I went to Jerry and said, why don't you pick Adrian for the key role of a scientist? Of course, it's not up to me to decide about the cast. Yeah, exactly. Okay, we're going to get to audience questions. So start putting some questions in the chat on YouTube only. I'm only taking YouTube questions because I want to reward my members and subscribers there. You have to be a subscriber. Bonus points to become a member. And by the way, this stream will be taken off as soon as we're done. And we have to do, we'll do some value add to it. So it'll disappear for a little bit. But we'll bring it back. Don't worry. Don't worry. So I do want to ask some questions. Before we get there, though, I want to talk about the null hypothesis. always have to be aware of the null hypothesis.

It could be a Coxian comet, right? What are we going to learn about comets? To give Brian, again, the devil is due, it's not a devil, but to give the devil is due, so to speak, devil's advocate. If it is one of these miraculous things that are natural comets, and so what have we learned about this commentary object, if indeed it is a comet? What mysteries has it raised about comets? If indeed, again, it's not technological.

But it's certainly interstellar. What do we learn about it? So I actually wrote papers on each and every point that I will make. One is the high speed of this object. It was 60 kilometers per second outside the solar system. And together with my undergraduate student, Shokruz Kakarov, we integrated the trajectory back in time through the galactic potential, the gravitational potential of the Milky Way galaxy.

And we concluded that it must have originated from the thick disk, meaning that the population of old stars around the disk of the Milky Way galaxy, they were steered over a long period of time by passing objects, by passing dwarf galaxies that join the Milky Way and so forth. So the old stars have a much larger velocity dispersion than the young stars that are born in the thin disk out of molecular clouds. And we found that this object must have originated, if it's natural, from old stars that are older than the sun,

perhaps 10 billion years old. And so that's one thing you would know about the origin. We don't know which star, of course, because we don't know how long the journey was. And the second thing is it's made presumably of carbon dioxide. So that must have formed in the so-called ice line of carbon dioxide, which is farther away from the star,

the parent star, then the water ice line, where we found our comets to have been made in the solar system. So this was an object that was made in the carbon dioxide ice line around the parent star. The question is, why is it so massive? So unless we find that this object is less than a kilometer in size, there would be a problem with the mass budget. I did that calculation in the first paper as soon as the object was discovered, and I showed that there is just not enough mass in ejected the solid material from planetary systems to account for the delivery of a five to 20 kilometer object, solid object, over the past decade. You would expect it to arrive to the inner solar system once for 10,000 years.

It's very rare. And so we will have a problem with the mass budget. Again, this is a problem not only that Brian Cox ignores, but all the comet experts are not discussing it much. There was one discussion by Darryl Zelligman about it. And so I see that it's a serious issue. If this object is indeed much bigger than one kilometer, then there is a mass budget issue. And it will teach us that there are much more prolific factories of objects like that than we imagine based on what we know about planetary systems. So again, the origin story is unusual here.

And finally, we would have to explain the nickel versus iron. And that is still an unresolved problem even in the context of regular comets. So we will need to come up with an explanation. And for the initial ante-tellate, that we discussed before. The question is, was it a result of large dust particles, you know, like much bigger, at least, you know, if there are 100 to a thousand times bigger in size,

as some comet experts are arguing, there are a million to a billion times more massive. So you need to say those dust particles are up between a million and a billion times more massive than the typical dust particles that scatter sunlight. And that means that you have, have to release a huge mass of dust out of the 3A Atlas. And talk about Avi, I was curious about the fact we talked about the anti-tail, which is anomalous,

but then it turned into a tail. Have we ever seen that kind of behavior before in an ordinary comment? No, no. So it's all, you know, and I decided to write two papers about it, trying to explain the physics, because, you know, whatever is released from the object must follow the laws of physics. And we wrote. those papers with Eric Ito. I should say the editor, when we submitted one of them to a

journal, the editor said, you know, this subject may not be of great interest to the wide astronomy community. And so then we submitted to another journal and got a very favorable report. And I just want to emphasize that because I don't know how

often you experience that, but whenever you are trying to write a significant paper, you get a lot of resistance. When you just write about the nuance of something that is already known and you especially cite a lot of papers so that the referee is being cited in your paper, then the paper sails smoothly through the refereeing process. And that I find as a problem because, you know, we are supposed to seek new knowledge in science. And instead, what happens in the scientific culture of today is that new knowledge is resisted. We don't want

to hear new ideas. We don't want to discuss new possibilities of explaining anomalies. We just want to stick by what we already know. And that's really unfortunate for an editor to claim. And I know the editor because they identified themselves. You know, that editor is not very accomplished. That editor is a second-class scientist. And of course, from the point of view of someone with traditional thinking, we shouldn't attend to anomalies.

You know, like, why should we? We can just say that comets are strange and that would resolve it. Each comet is unusual, and that's it. We don't need to explain why the antitel exists. And I find that to be anti-scientific, because whenever you see something you don't expect, you should explain that. And maybe you learn something new in the process. But if you don't imagine something new, then you will never need to explain anything,

and you just ignore it. Okay, so everybody, get your questions there. Also go to my website, Brian Keene.com slash YT to register to win a meteorite, enter the competition to win a meteorite. I am going to be giving out some on the occasion of the Gemini Meteor shower coming up. You don't need a.edu email address, but if you have one like me and I'll be at a Briankeen.com slash edu, and you'll guarantee to win one of these beauties sent to your inbox if you live in the United States. I can only do that.

And the U.S. Kudu export regulations is slightly radioactive. Avi can tell you all the interesting things about it. I'll bring one to Avi. I owe you a bunch of these babies, Avi. Don't worry. I'll give it to you. Did Joe Rogan still have the Mars meteorite that I gave him? I mean, he kind of, you know, I was worried he smoked it.

I was worried that he maybe smoked it or did something to it. I don't know. I saw some rock there, but the thing that really surprised me are all these mugshots of people like Mike Chagher. Yeah, Klaus Schwab. All these supposedly criminals that used to be artists. And, you know, at the time, of course, what they smoked was. band. Exactly. Okay. So Avi, we're going to take audience questions. Please, if you're member of the channel, drop a question in the chat, the live chat, we'll take some of those. But I want to ask you

just a human question as a friend of yours. You know, we've had these two encounters with objects Omuamua and now Atlas. Which one, if I could, you know, kind of put you on a Brookheimer movie and send you out to one of these? Which one fascinates you the most? Which one would you most like to visit and why scientifically is it the most interesting to you. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75

sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. You know, I would love to visit both, but the Omoa, Muamua, to me, is more puzzling because there was no evidence for dust or gas around it, and yet it was pushed away from the sun. And, you know, three years later, the same telescope in Hawaii discovered another object that was pushed by sunlight, and that was 2020 SO, and that turned out to be a rocket booster that we launched that NASA launched back in 1966. And since then, we did.

discovered a lot of space junk, you know, things that we produced that are floating in space and were mistaken for rocks for a while. There are two dozens of those examples that the Minor Planet Center cataloged this asteroids and they ended up being actually space junk. So the reason we identify those as space junk is simply because we produced it and we know what we produced since the 60s. However, if someone else produced something, we would argue that it must be a rock. Why? Because we didn't, we don't know the properties of that thing.

So three, so, or more in my mind could have been something like that and just, you know, a thin layer that was produced as part of something else. And I would love, I would have loved to come close to it that just take an image. or even a radar image of it or of a 3-A-Atlas. If any of them has buttons on it, I would love to press a button. What do you think is the most likely explanation for the claimed data from the Palomar plates, which are, you know, 75 years old now? I mean, some of these things. I have some of them from Margaret Burbage, your colleague, my colleague and friend here,

a renowned astronomer of human history. She left me some of her plates from Palomar, which is just incredible treasure that I'll keep to my dying day and maybe pass on to my green. Yeah, so I would worry about defects in those plates. And, you know, these were photographic plates. And they could have had defects and these defects could have been clustered. These defects could have appeared in regions of the plate that are, you know, by chance, correlated with the shadow of the earth. you know, like, who knows? So that's the first thing I would check.

And of course, if there was evidence from two telescopes of a single object seen, then of course it's beyond any doubt because the chance of both of them having the same defect in the same place at the same time is very small. But just having data from one telescope is not immune to defects. And the defects may depend on the level of illumination. So what are the sort of chromatic effects, perhaps? These are all the archival. They've been stored and not always taking good care as the ones I take care of from Margaret.

But what other effects? Did they degrade? I mean, these are glass plates with photographic emulsion onto them that then have to be scanned, digitized, and so forth. And then look that out under microscope. And only some of that's been done. I mean, as far as I know. No, no. So in fact, that's exactly what was done for the other plate stacks.

Yes. And Josh Greenlee led this project where they were digitized with a camera. And so we have a digital archive of the Harvard plates. Do you have that same date in October or whatever July? Well, that's exactly the question that I asked Josh today. And he will look into that. So he will look at the time tag and the coordinates of the events that were claimed to be associated with these glints and see if his data, overlaps in any way or rules out. I mean, so it could either rule in or rule out the reality of those identifications. So people are asking about the strange confluence of events. Some of my channel members are asking about the mini moon that was discovered. Yes.

Also, obviously Beatrice's work with her team on the Palomarde. All this, an Atlas. And then there's two comets that are naked eye comets. Is there something, you know, harmonic convergence aside, Avi? What do you make of all this? Is it just that we're getting better and social media spreading information, good and bad, but of also spreading, you know, I took a beautiful picture of Comet Lemon the other night, you know, and I took a picture of Comet Swan.

It looked very green and unusual. So what do you make of all this interest in these extraterrestrial objects at least? Well, you know, these things happen all the time. You know, it's just like going to a party where, you know, you find people, independently speaking about different things, you know, different conversations and different things happening at the same time. So in the sky, in space,

there are lots of things happening at the same time. And, you know, we might not be aware of that, but now we have better instruments to survey the sky. So suddenly we see a lot of things at the same time. And of course, the Rubin Observatory will give us a sense not only of our immediate neighborhood, but also what happens in the galaxy at large, in the universe at large,

all kinds of transients that were never seen, seen before. So we will have a survey of the southern sky every four nights and we just need one for the northern sky. So the existence of a lot of events is not surprising to me. They happen all the time. There is nothing anomalous about them out there. With respect to the second moon or quasi-moon, the claim is that it's a member of a family of rocks that was found to sort of move around the sun and every now and then come close to the earth. I found it interesting that this particular moon that was, or not moon, but quasi-moon that was identified in August 2025, this August, is actually was close to Earth since the 1960s. And to me, that raised the possibility that it may be one of the upper stages of the missions that were launched in the 60s.

So in fact, in 1964, the first mission to Venus was launched by the Soviet Union. And we checked the trajectory, and it's not very different from this object. There are some differences. But, you know, in principle, you can imagine having one of these space relics from the 60s appearing as if, you know, it's close to Earth just by the fact that it was launched from Earth, you know, in the 1990s. and so we looked into that actually and I wrote an essay about that but it's not a conclusive identification for 2020 as so this object discovered three years after a

Muamuah the realization that it is technological was based on this a spectrum that was taken in the infrared of this object that discovered the feature spectral features that indicate that it is it's made of stainless steel. So they saw the signatures of stainless steel, and obviously a rock would never show that. So that's the benefit of taking a spectrum that reveals the composition of the surface of the object. So my audience members that are kind enough and generous enough to join the channel are asking questions about the propulsion structure that would be necessary to close the gap and actually come and make contact with it, which made me think of Elon Musk. And I'm curious.

I've talked to him briefly on this channel about a year and a half ago now about his dream to die on Mars, you know, hopefully not on impact. You know, we want him to die at a ripe old age. So I looked up on Grockapedia. I don't know. Have you encountered Grockapedia yet? It's kind of a... I can imagine.

Yeah, yeah. So I looked up Oumuua, and of course, you know, you can look up anything on GROC and they'll tell you what you want to hear, you know. But this question of, you know, kind of like you have an hour with Elon. He's a smart guy. He knows a lot about the rocket equation. and so forth. What kinds of things would you need, you know, to get either, would you want to to catch up to Three Eye Atlas? Would you want to, I mean, think big, Abbey. What's your wish list? Go to Omoa or have a series of Sentinels, you know, along the lines of Arthur C. Clark, my protege,

my for monoliths, sentinels. What would you have on your wish list for our friend of the show, Elon Musk? Yeah, so if we wanted to reach Three Eye Atlas, we would need a rocket that is at least three times faster than the ones we have. We can't do that. It's not practical at the moment. I would say, let's prepare for the next one. And with the Rubin Observatory, we should find a new interstellar object every few months. But we need to be prepared. We need to have a plan for an interceptor. So we need to deploy it potentially at a Lagrange point around the Earth or somewhere else in an orbit it around the sun so that it will be able to catch up with a future interstellar object. And the earlier we detect an interstellar object, the better, because then we have more time

for the interceptor to move into the path of this object as it comes closer. And the European Space Agency has a project called the Comet Interceptor. But the problem with that is they are capable of a velocity kick of two kilometers per second, that's what they assigned to the fuel that they put on the comet interceptor. The design is allowing only two kilometers per second boost. That's not enough because interstellar objects are coming at tens of kilometers per second. You know, so unless we are lucky, like in the case of Juno, I mean, in the case of Juneau, two kilometers per second would have been sufficient, but it doesn't have the fuel with it.

But then what we want is an interceptor mission that has more fuel so that it can maneuver at the level of 10 kilometers per second and get to the right time at the right place. And that is something that needs planning and an investment. And you know, the investment may be at a level of a billion dollars or so in preparation for the next interstellar object. And I think the benefits are great. both for science and also technology if we are able to do that because we can then learn a lot about the nature of the object and how we can mitigate any potential risk if it happens to move closer closer to earth yeah no one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets they go for a darn good pizza lately though shop's been quiet so Hank decides to bring back the one dollar slice he

gas co-pilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs. To help him see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now, Hanks has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365 copilot.com slash work. So some of my members, again, you could join the channel as a member for 99 cents a month.

It lets me know you guys care about it. Otherwise, you know, we try to keep these minimal sponsorship, at least with except for YouTube's algorithm, which you can get around if you pay YouTube $19 a month, but as I do. Someone's asking, could 3-Ey Atlas, probably not, but could other objects, maybe the type that Beatrice saw, could they be Earth artifacts, could they be ejecta, kicked up as we have here, as I gave to Joe Rogan, you know, a fragment of Mars and the moon, here's a fragment of the moon, that came from an impact on the moon that sprayed out and landed on Earth in Northwest Africa. Tell me, could any of these objects she saw, maybe these other objects, could they come plausibly from the Earth in its distant history?

No, not really. I mean, obviously you can produce an interstellar object from the Earth, and we have a demonstration of that in the form of Voyager 1, Voyager 2, Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, and New Horizons. They are made of materials found on Earth, and they were launched at a speed high enough so that they will exit the solar system and become interstellar in about 10,000 years. once they exit the outskirts of the Oort cloud. That's at a distance of 100,000 times the Earth's sun separation.

So there is a proof of principle that if you launch something fast enough, it can actually exit the solar system and become interstellar, but it will never come back. So what we see for these objects is not an object that is marginally bound to the sun, so it goes out and then comes back. It's an object that just comes into the solar system with a high speed. In the case of Three-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-Rle.

It's 60 kilometers per second outside the solar system, which is twice the speed of the Earth around the sun. And so there is no way by which we can produce such an object from the solar system. It had to come from outside.

And, you know, that's why we call it interstellar. There is, of course, some people try to suggest that maybe a muamua came from a collision in the outer part of the solar system. That's because Omuamua was just almost at rest relative to the local standard of rest of the Milky Way galaxy. And it simply, the solar system bumped into it. But the chance of a collision of any objects in the outer parts of the solar system is minuscule. There is no way that we could

have gotten an object like Omuomua or especially Three-Ey Atlas this way. Very good. Okay, last couple of questions. One is you mentioned the prospect of both Pascal's wager and Trojan horse, you know, kind of not wanting to repeat the Trojan horse affair. What are the odds of these different things from your perspective? That could be a Trojan horse. Is it dangerous, perhaps? And then later I'll ask you, what it would take for you to stop discussing these types of object? People are curious about, you know, do you have a price? Is somebody, you know, putting you up to this, Avi? But we'll get to that, the final question. But first of all, is it a Trojan horse? How would we know? And what could we do about it in that case and brings a past...

Right. So broadly speaking, a Trojan horse is something that has an appearance that is friendly, that is not suspicious in any way, but an interior that is potentially harmful. And in the context of what I'm discussing, the interior could be technological. So imagine hollowing out a comet or an asteroid. And the inner part of it is actually technological, the out part, the outer part, the appearance of it, you know, is just as if it's a natural object. And this is a very comfortable way of passing through planetary systems

and not raising any doubts that the object might actually be a trojan horse where there are soldiers inside of it. Now, how do we figure out whether it is or not? Well, first, if we had a way of measuring the mean density of the object, a hollow object would have much less mass given its size. And in principle, we can measure the mass of an object. For example, when we will have the next generation gravitational wave detectors, they would be sensitive to massive objects passing through the inner solar system. So probing the gravity of the object would be a great benefit

because it will tell us whether there is a hollow object. Another way to tell is if there is an engine that would be excess heat being produced beyond what the solar radiation is warming the surface width. So we know the illumination, how much power punitive area is deposited on the surface of an object, depending on its distance from the sun. But if it emits in the infrared excess heat, that may come from an engine. And of course, there could be artificial lights that we detect that have nothing to do with sunlight. And so we should observe the object in the infrared.

And as long as we can resolve it, we can distinguish between the plume of gas or dust around it and the nucleus. So these are ways to tell the difference between a Trojan horse and a completely innocent, in our case, a piece of rock. If we could measure the mean density or the mass of the object. And if we don't detect, you know, if it walks like a duck and it walks like a duck, it's a duck. You know, I have no problem with that. And, you know, as long as, like if, for example, this object breaks up and we see that it's, you know, all of the pieces look just like the pieces of a natural icy object that is made mostly of carbon dioxide, so be it. You know, that would clear the ambiguity we have. Well, Avi, the final question touches upon this very rare quality that few human beings have, and that's courage.

people want to know, you know, will you stop looking at this? If people came to you and they, you know, were curious and what they could do to make you stop looking into these things, asking these questions, being a critic, holding up a mirror, holding up a spotlight on these objects, are you going to stop? And what's in it for you? I mean, they do accuse you. I've been accused of it. Our friends of it. Grifter, I don't even know what it means. I mean, are you getting paid by big NASA?

I mean, I, you know, I, you know, how do you respond to the accusation? that you're a grifter, Avi. I mean, even Joe Rogan, when I was on, he wanted to kind of bait me into say stuff, and I didn't take the bait. But what do you make of that accusation? And then what would it take for you to stop and just be quiet, Avi? Stop asking questions. Well, the point is that that's the whole idea about doing science at the frontier,

trying to figure out something that we don't know. And there is a huge amount of enthusiasm. You know, I just received 51 watercolors and two bronze. the sculptures of Galileo Galilei donated to my office last week by the most accomplished sculptor in the United States called Greg Wyatt. In two weeks we will do the unveiling of those amazing pieces of art and they are all in my office. Extremely expensive stuff, you know, this is a, my office is now a museum and I will not charge anything for anyone that comes into my office. But just think about the generosity of this sculptor, the artist, to make the 51 watercolors,

each of them took him several days to weeks to make because it's stippled. He made them out of dots. And he decided to donate all of that. He framed it at no cost to me. He just gave it to me as a generous gift being inspired by my research. There is a singer in the United Kingdom that his manager contacted. me. Ollie Swan, that he has a song coming out next month called the Alien Surreal. He was inspired by what I do. And they wanted a quote from me about the song. And, you know, I heard from

a pilot of the U.S. Air Force, a former pilot that he said, because of you, my daughter decided to become a scientist. And I actually corresponded with her because I mentioned her name with Joe Rogan and and she told me just an hour ago that because it was mentioned, John Rogan, then the principal of the of the school that she goes to, they announced it to the entire school and that she was very proud of that and she wants to become a scientist. So that's amazing, you know, how, and then a reporter of the London Times wrote a report about my work and he read it to his kids and they said they want to become scientists. So I see that all over, you know, when people tell me, now we realize that science is exciting.

You know, and the fact that I'm attacked personally is irrelevant here because I'm serving a very good purpose of bringing people to appreciate science. All those other, you know, commentators that say they know the answer in advance, they don't inspire the public, you know. And this is a subject that public cares about the public funds science. So we have a duty to explain to the public why science can be interesting. And because it's work in progress. We shouldn't say that we know the answer in advance.

Now, those people who are trying to derail what I'm doing, they will go far and beyond what sounds like a professional behavior. And I don't want to mention specific details, but they really are trying to throw as much mud as possible in all directions. I regard that as mud wrestling, and I don't want to get dirty, so I don't engage with them at all. but they're doing really unprofessional and very dirty tricks and i i just ignore that you know i i think that this is part of the scientific process that a lot of people are inspired much more you

know by factors of several orders of magnitude more people find it inspiring than those that are and those that are doing it are doing it because of jealousy of the public attention as long as the subject didn't get public attention they were perfectly fine with it and and the strange thing is that Some of those mud wrestlers are people who advocate for SETI, for the search for radio signals. However, they have a problem with the search for technological signatures in objects coming to the solar system. And I find that really strange. Why would they do that? And they still do that.

But it doesn't matter to me. You see, I don't have a footprint on social media with Joe Rogan said, thank God for that. And I said, don't thank God. Thank my wife. Yeah, that's right. Well, explains your productivity as well. And I just want people to know, if you come after Avi, you're coming after me. If you come after my hyperskinadium, alien artifact that Avi gave me, you'll have to pry it from my cold dead hands.

Avi, what's the next major event for this object, comet or not, technology or not? When's the next major event that we can schedule the next conversation? Oh, okay. So next week, it will be observable to the Jewish mission of the European Skis. space agency. It will be observable. We'll get some data hopefully a few weeks later, but next week it will be seen by juice.

And that is very important because we can tell if it deviated from the trajectory that we anticipated. And then after that, it will be the December 19th date, which is six days before Christmas. And my hope is that it will not send any gifts on that at that time. That would be the time when it's closest to the earth. It's also around Hanukkah.

And so... I don't have any money left. You told me to sell my whole portfolio, Avi. I've got no gifts for guilt, even. My guilt is gone, Avi. But Jus is a NASA mission. So we probably won't hear anything next week, right? So let's plan on talking.

It's an Issa. Issa. Okay. So there's some NASA mission. The thing is they are using the communication antenna. a shield from the sun. So they won't be able to transmit the signal after getting it in the first week of November.

They'll submit it. They'll transmit the signal probably a few weeks later. So we will just have to be patient. But then on December 19th, we can observe it from Earth. You know, the 242 observatories already that looked at the three Atlas. That would be the best time to look at it. Also, if you are an amateur astronomer, you can use your big telescope to look at it. And so that's when I hope to get as much data as possible.

And then eventually it will come close to Mars on March 16, 2026. So that's when the story will probably fade away. If it continues along its path and it looks just like a comet, you know, then it's a comet. And that's so important. Sorry, Avi. I want to end there because what Avi just said is the mark of a good scientist. And I taught many scientists, not as many as Avi. I've written the square root of the number of papers.

I have the H index. That's a logarithm of Obie's. But I recognize a good scientist when they hear it. And what he just said is a testimony to what you need as a scientist, Avi. I always say you got to have chutzpah because nature is undefeated. Nature will crush you if you have arrogance, if you have haughtiness. Like some people do, that we started off the conversation, perhaps, I don't know. But you have to have humility.

You have to have these two pockets. In one, it says you are made of nothing but dust and ashes. The other one you say, the whole universe is meant for me to explore and be inspired by Avilob. Thank you so much. got to run and we'll talk in a week or two weeks, perhaps, and we'll get a next update on this fascinating object. Thank you for doing so much to inspire young people, old people, and professionals and non-professionals alike through a combination of envy, jealousy, and just imagination and passion about what you do. Thank you, Avi, my friend, and I'll talk to you soon.

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