Now I want to see if on Facebook, YouTube, and the blogs of supposed pseudo-UFOlogists, these idiots will invent some excuse, or simply delete their profiles or bury their heads in the sand in shame!
The so-called comet 31 Atlas, which some claimed was an "alien spacecraft," seems to have disintegrated. The Israeli astronomer Avi Loeb himself, who launched the alien spacecraft theory, has already realized the ridiculousness of it and also admits that the comet disintegrated into 16 pieces.
Comet 3I/ATLAS recently made its closest passage to the Sun, or perihelion, shining brightly in observations as solar radiation caused it to consume gases at an identical rate.
The object, widely considered a comet, is losing an impressive amount of mass as it emerges from behind the Sun—so much, in fact, that Harvard astrophysicist and keen observer of 3I/ATLAS, Avi Loeb, suggests it may have fragmented into as many as twelve pieces.
New images captured by British astronomers Michael Buechner and Frank Niebling show the object developing a huge "anti-tail" and a separate trail, "smoke jets," that extend approximately 1,000,000 kilometers toward the Sun and 3,000,000 kilometers in the opposite direction, respectively, as Loeb notes in a new post on his blog.
For a natural comet, the exit velocity of the jets is estimated at 0.248 miles per second… at the distance of 3I/ATLAS from the Sun,” he added. “At that speed, the jets should persist for a period of 1 to 3 months.”
As always, according to Loeb's calculations, 3I/ATLAS would need to absorb a huge amount of energy from the Sun to sublimate the necessary amounts of carbon dioxide ice and water ice, thus losing a large portion of its mass.
“At perihelion distance, the Sun provided 700 joules per square meter per second,” Loeb wrote. “This means that the absorption area of 3I/ATLAS must have been greater than [617 square miles],” which is roughly equivalent to a sphere with a diameter of 14.3 miles.
This is four times larger than his previous estimate that the object measured at least 3.1 miles in diameter, with a mass of at least 33 billion tons.
Although solar system comets are expected to lose mass as they approach the Sun, 3I/ATLAS still appears to be an unusual case.
“The surface area required of 3I/ATLAS to provide the inferred mass loss from the most recent post-perihelion image is “at least 16 times greater than the upper limit derived here from its Hubble image on July 21, 2025,” Loeb wrote. “When Webb data was collected on August 6, 2025, 3I/ATLAS was losing only [330 pounds] per second.”
In other words, the mysterious visitor went from losing a few hundred pounds per second in August to approximately 4.4 million pounds per second near perihelion, a “drastic increase,” according to Loeb.
“Could the drastic mass loss and increased brightness of 3I/ATLAS at perihelion be evidence of its disintegration?” the astronomer questioned. “Fragmentation would have increased the surface area of its material.”
Loeb suggests that 3I/ATLAS may have split into “at least 16 equal parts, and probably many more,” which “would mean that 3I/ATLAS exploded at perihelion and we are witnessing the result of that explosion.”
Alternatively, the astronomer is not willing to rule out the possibility that 3I/ATLAS could be “something other than a natural comet” if “future observations reveal that 3I/ATLAS was not decimated by the Sun and maintained its integrity as a single body.”
Sources; NASA, Futurism
0 Comments