Let’s run through what we know about 3I/ATLAS, now accepted as the third interstellar object to be identified moving through the Solar System. It seems obvious not only that our increasingly powerful telescopes will continue to find these interlopers, but that they are out there in vast numbers. A calculation in 2018 by John Do, Michael Tucker and John Tonry (citation below) offers a number high enough to make these the most common macroscopic objects in the galaxy. But that may well depend on how they originate, a question of lively interest and one that continues to produce papers.
Let me draw on a just released preprint from Matthew Hopkins (University of Oxford) and colleagues that runs through the formation options. Pointing out that interstellar object (ISO) studies represent an entirely new field, they note that theoretical thinking about such things trended toward comets as the main source, an idea immediately confronted by ‘Oumuamua, which appeared inert even as it drew closer to the inner system and even appeared to accelerate as it departed. The controversy over its origin made 2I/Borisov a relatively tame object, it being clearly a comet. 3I/ATLAS looks a lot more like 2I/Borisov than ‘Oumuamua, though it’s larger than either.
Protoplanetary disks are a possible source of interstellar debris, but so for that matter are the Oort-like clouds that likely surround most main sequence stars, and that would largely be released when their hosts complete their evolution. ‘Oumuamua has been analyzed as a fragment of a small, outer-system world around another star, or even as a ‘hydrogen iceberg,’ and I see there is one paper suggesting that ISOs may be a part of galactic renewal, contributing their materials into protoplanetary disks and nascent planets.
The Hopkins paper underlines the ubiquity of such objects:
A standard picture has emerged, in which planetesimals formed within a protoplanetary disk are scattered by interactions with migrating planets or via stellar flybys, early in the history of a system (Fitzsimmons et al. 2023). The number density inferred from observations of the first two ISOs, in addition to studies of scattering in our own Solar System, suggest that such events are common, with ≳ 90% of planetesimals joining the ISO population (Jewitt & Seligman 2023). Such objects spread around the Milky Way’s disk in braided streams (Forbes et al. 2024), a small fraction of which intersect our Solar System. The observed ISO population is thus truly galactic, rather than being associated with local stars and stellar populations.
Image: ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) has obtained new images of 3I/ATLAS, an interstellar object discovered in recent weeks. Identified as a comet, 3I/ATLAS is only the third visitor from outside the Solar System ever found, after 1I/ʻOumuamua and 2I/Borisov. Its highly eccentric hyperbolic orbit, unlike that of objects in the Solar System, gave away its interstellar origin. In this image, several VLT observations have been overlaid, showing the comet as a series of dots that move towards the right of the image over the course of about 13 minutes on the night of 3 July 2025. The data were obtained with the FORS2 instrument, and are available in the ESO archive. Credit: European Southern Observatory.
I’m struck anew by how much our view of our Solar System’s place in the cosmos has changed. The size and density of the Kuiper Belt only swam into focus when the first KBO was discovered in 1992, although the belt had been hypothesized by Kenneth Edgeworth in the 1930s and Gerald Kuiper in 1951. The vast Oort Cloud of comets that envelops our entire system was posited by Jan Hendrik Oort in 1950. Now we’re looking at populations of objects at minute sub-planetary scale existing between the stars in unfathomable numbers.
Hopkins and team point out that the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will dramatically increase the number of confirmed ISOs. So then, what do we have on 3I/ATLAS? The early work on the object identifies it as a comet with a compact coma, a cloud of gas and dust surrounding the nucleus. It’s also bigger than its two predecessors, perhaps as large as 10 kilometers, as opposed to ‘Oumuamua and Borisov’s roughly 0.1 kilometers, although a more precise number will emerge as we learn more about its composition and albedo. It enters the Solar System at a higher speed than the latter ISOs, but one well within the distribution model used in this paper.
Interestingly, the object shows high vertical motion out of the plane of the galaxy, ruling out the idea that it comes from the same star as ‘Oumuamua or Borisov. That velocity points to an origin in the Milky Way’s thick disk – stars above and below the disk within which the Solar System resides. It is the first object to be identified as such. Says Hopkins:
“All non-interstellar comets such as Halley’s comet formed with our solar system, so are up to 4.5 billion years old. But interstellar visitors have the potential to be far older, and of those known about so far our statistical method suggests that 3I/ATLAS is very likely to be the oldest comet we have ever seen.”
The team’s model (based on Gaia data, disk chemistry and galactic dynamics) was developed during Hopkins’ doctoral research. It emerges as the first real-time application of predictive modelling to an interstellar comet. It likewise predicts that 3I/ATLAS will have a high water content. We’ll be able to check on that as observations continue. Co-author Michele Bannister, of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, points out that 3I/ATLAS is already showing activity as it warms during its approach to the Sun. The gases the comet produces as it moves toward perihelion at 1.36 AU in October will tell us more.
The paper is Hopkins et al., “From a Different Star: 3I/ATLAS in the context of the ̄Otautahi–Oxford interstellar object population model,” submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters and available as a preprint. The paper on the density of the interstellar object population is Do, Tucker & Tonry, “Interstellar Interlopers: Number Density and Origin of ‘Oumuamua-like Objects,” Astrophysical Journal Letters Vol. 855 (6 March 2018), L10. Full text. Also be aware of a new paper by Avi Loeb at Harvard that I haven’t yet had time to review. It’s “Comment on “Discovery and Preliminary Characterization of a Third Interstellar Object: 3I/ATLAS” (preprint).
I suspect these interstellar objects are from Oort clouds around other stars as they can’t form in deep space.
https://www.almaobservatory.org/en/press-releases/largest-oort-cloud-comet-ever-observed-unveils-its-secrets-with-almas-powerful-gaze/
What I hope is that at some point we can build a ISO object chaser, lander and return sample like a comet mission. We get a good sized sample. What happens if we radiometric date that sample a bunch of time and it is 20 billion years old. Our hypothesized age of the universe will be proven wrong. If they really are ISO objects have far have them come. If they are from nearby, then they should be 4.5 billion years old or roughly the age of our solar system. If not, then they might be older. This is a question that can only be answered with radiometric dating.
Planets around older stars would have older rocks.
This would rely on very long 1/2 life radionucleides with decent abundances in the comet material.
Commonly used long 1/2 life isotopes with 1/2 life in years for terrestrial dating.
IDK what their abundances in comets would be. Enough?
potassium-40 1.251E9 -> argon-40, calcium-40
uranium-238 4.468E9 -> lead-206 (eventually)
thorium-232 14.05E9 -> lead-208 ( ditto )
What other long 1/2 isotopes would be good for comets?
ICPMS instruments available to the commercial market routinely measure at sub-nanogram level. Both uranium and thorium are easily determined in almost anything. I have seen isotope results for uranium in tree bark for example. So I am not sure determining the isotope ratios in cometary material would be a challenge for state of the art instruments.
You got the best radioactive isotopes here. Sample return from an ISO difficult because the radiometric clocks can be reset by billions of years of cosmic rays on the surface of material as seen in Moon rocks. One has to dig into the rocks or get a large sample. A solid body would be needed and not a comet, so the mission would be expensive using complicated mechanics. At some point a man mission could be used due to the more efficient faster propulsion the future spacecraft. I don’t expect this to happen anytime soon.
Since the Great Galactic Ghoul’s other name is Murphy, as soon as it is launched we wouldn’t see another Interstellar Object for another decade or two.
I would like to see a chart showing the location of spacecraft and asteroids to ATLAS path.
Is it “behind” New Horizons such that the probe could get ahead of it?
Are any Mars craft fuel fat enough to gradually raise its orbit to get near the object?
Some years ago, there was a CD post on the probability that panspermia could spread life across the stars. The calculation was that this was exceedingly low, and therefore, presumably, not a competitor mechanism to abiogenesis.
This was before the discovery of interstellar objects entering our system, of which we now have 3, and likely to be of higher frequency as our telescopes prove more capable.
This situation makes me ponder again the possibility of panspermia, mediated by interstellar comets/objects, and the mechanisms by which they may spread life.
We know terrestrial bacteria can be found even in the stratosphere. Some will inevitably be “blown off” the Earth by high-altitude winds, the solar wind, etc. Therefore, there should be a very sparse distribution of bacterial cells/spores in space, spreading outwards into interstellar space with ever-decreasing density.
We know that some bacteria can survive in space, as demonstrated by bacteria living on the outside of the ISS.
An interstellar comet entering a system may by chance sweep up bacterial spores, with increasing probability the deeper into the system they go, where an inhabited planet exists. This helps build up an inventory of bacteria.
If the comment penetrates inside the HZ, it will shed some of those bacteria in its dust tail. Some of those bacteria will enter the atmosphere of a habitable world.
The surface of the comet will cool and settle, burying and protecting its bacterial payload as it exits the system.
With interstellar comets passing through different systems, sometimes collecting bacteria well outside the orbit where a tail will form, and shedding bacteria when the tail forms, sometimes inside the orbit of a habitable world, which may pass through its tail.
The primary habitable world may not even need to be the first recipient of bacterial spores, as other bodies may become repositories of the bacteria shed by the comet, which in turn eventually enter the atmosphere of the habitable world. (This reminds me of the spread of infectious bacteria in hospitals, with intermediate surfaces temporarily holding bacteria until they are passed on, eventually reaching a sick patient in a distant ward.)
Is the frequency of interstellar comets passing through systems, collecting and shedding bacteria (other life), a mechanism for panspermia that might exceed the probability of abiogenesis?
Unlike the survival of bacterial spores unprotected in the interstellar medium, a comment may prove a more benign habitat, which may even provide a opportunity for bacteria to multiply during the phase when the comet is warm enough to shed a tail, and allowing the bacteria to burrow deeper into the comet further protecting them as the comet returns to interstellar space.
Might it be possible for a probe to such a comet to locate any life, and even return a sample, to determine whether it is from Earth (harvested during its entry to our system) or alien (from another system)?
A sample of a bacterium with both proteins and DNA would likely be sufficient to determine origin. If the genes produce the proteins with the terrestrial genetic code, it may well be a terrestrial bacterium and fit in our phylogenetic tree of life. If the needed genetic code is different, or the bases and amino acids are not completely identical to terrestrial life, then we may have evidence of a separate abiogenesis, and proof that ET life exists. Perhaps the bacterium has the same bases, amino acids, and genetic code, but the gene sequences appear to be rather different from our terrestrial bacteria. Perhaps this is evidence of a shared abiogenesis, but with divergent evolutionary pathways due to a different planetary environment.
Harvesting such bacterial passengers from interstellar objects might be the best hope that we have of collecting ET life directly, as these comets are the delivery mechanism that manages the long times between systems at STL speeds, but reach us with a frequency that vastly improves the search space for ET life samples that cannot be obtained any other way.
To my mind, a probe to an asteroid or comet near Earth would be the best way to determine if bacteria are swept up from bacteria that leave Earth. Sterilizing the probe would be very important to prevent contamination. The Hayabusa 2 probe to Ryugu, the OSIRIS-REx probe to asteroid Bennu, and the Stardust probe to comet Wild 2 seem to be the way to go in this regard.
It was probability this post, Alex:
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2021/11/16/probing-the-likelihood-of-panspermia/
Google AI thinks the panspermia idea is far fetched for a number of reasons: We put the bacteria there on the international space station. Furthermore bacteria would have to be launched off the planet which puts the chicken before the egg. The great distances involved for the interstellar travel time. Google AI has some supporting evidence as well which I don’t agree with all of it like the idea that life started quickly which I think is favored by Earthly chemistry and not falling from space with an extremely small sample since the idea that space is chock full of microbial life does not match observations.
The fact that life started quickly in my opinion more supports life evolved on Earth considering the idea that it is impossible for it to evolve in space. It’s one thing for bacteria to survive there a couple of years, but another thing for it to be evolve there. How would it? From molecular gas clouds? The molecules are still for far apart. It had to start from somewhere and that would have to be in conditions favorable from life and an Earth 2.0 model with water and a thick atmosphere is the best place to start.
What was not considered was the re-entry heat from all meteors and the larger the mass the more powerful the explosion when it hits the Earth which would not make panspermia impossible, but highly improbable. Amino acids in meteors, yes, life has yet to be discovered in meteors.
@Geoffrey
With all due respect to Google Gemini, its logic is faulty.
1. The bacteria on the space station are just proof that bacteria can survive and remain viable in the vacuum and radiation of space. How they got there is irrelevant.
2. Bacteria or their spores are extremely low in mass. It is quite possible for them to be lifted by terrestrial forces into the high atmosphere and from there ejected by sunlight into an escape velocity. That may be rare, but that isn’t the point. The mass of bacteria may exceed that of all other organisms, and therefore, there is a large reservoir for some to escape. IDK if any were ever swept up by satellites sweeping up micrometeoroids, but I would certainly be interested in any experiments to look for such spores.
3. As I remarked below in my comment to Deanna, there need be no binary issue of panspermia vs abiogenesis for life on Earth. Panspermia (delivery of organisms) could be happening all the time, but the evolved life on Earth would prove far too efficient in mopping up any bugs that reached our world.
4. We assume that abiogenesis is local. If we don’t, that could end our research into life’s origin. It is somewhat eyebrow-raising that life appears to have arrived at a fairly sophisticated point within a few hundred years of Earth’s formation, especially as it had to survive the Hadean, not normally associated with a benign environment for life.
5. No one is suggesting life evolved in space. It evolved on a world and was then transported to other worlds. So this is a strawman argument.
6. reentry heat. Not all material has to reenter at high velocity and burn up like meteoroid showers. Material does reach the surface of the Earth without transformation. More like gentle floating down to earth than a fiery reentry. With the right tools, you can look for magnetic meteorite particles on flat roofs.
Did Loeb find any heavy-element magnetic particles in the ocean from his hypothesized [interstellar] artifact entry?
Crap editing on my part.
First ref was: Survival of microbes in Earth’s stratosphere
The physics is based on general relativity. Anything coming from space must enter our atmosphere at orbit velocity which is 17,500 mph. Escape velocity is 25,000 mph. Anything coming from another solar system would be really fast. It would first have to be captured by the Sun’s gravity, then Earth’s and then it would only hit the atmosphere at 17.500. Oumuamua, achieved 196,000 mph. There is no gentle floating down to Earth, unless you have anti gravity like the UFO’s.
There was no life in the Hadean period when the giant impacts occurred. It is called Hadean because of the extreme, hellish conditions, the molten surface, asteroid impacts, volcanism. Google AI. Life began in the Archean Eon.
I am not against the idea of Panspermia, but life would indeed be rare because there are many events that have to happen which increases the odds of its rareness like first there would have to be a giant impact and a piece of rock with life inside it which would have to find the right solar system and also planet which increases the odds. It can just be any solar system, but must have an Earth 2.0 which has contingencies that are a necessity when we are talking about intelligent life like us. These don’t vanish with the idea of Panspermia.
@Geoffrey
The Hadean era runs from 4.5 bn to 4.0 bn years ago. Yet as the CD post on LUCA indicates, LUCA is estimated to have been present about 4.2 bn years ago, i.e., within the Hadean. LUCA is only the last universal common ancestor of all terrestrial extant life based on genomics. Life must have started before LUCA. Either you have to accept that life started on Earth within the Hadean, or you have to argue that the estimates for the age of LUCA are incorrect.
I think you are using the wrong values, as well as misunderstanding the orbital dynamics.
The interstellar comet would enter the gravitational influence with a relative velocity that could be close to zero. That velocity will increase the deeper the comet ventures into the gravitational field. At the sun’s surface, the velocity would be in excess of 617 km/s. That is the comet’s body. However, the tails (both gas and dust) travel away from the head and away from the sun, so they must be moving more slowly than the comet. Conceivably, the dust tail could be moving at a low velocity, not far off the Earth’s orbital velocity. This would allow the dust to enter the Earth’s atmosphere well below Earth’s escape velocity. One way to think about this is to regard the dust in the tail to be like solar sails accelerating (decelerating) in response to the solar radiation. Depending on the dust’s density, a dust mote could be decelerated to reduce its velocity towards the sun, decelerate and become a statite, or accelerated away from the sun. Depending on where the Earth is in its orbit, the relative dust velocity with the Earth can be high or low. It is the latter that allows a “gentle”, non-destructive atmospheric entry. Remember, we are not talking about an object solely responding to gravity, but the interplay of gravity and solar radiation.
Other options are for the dust with microbe to land on a small, icy body in the solar system (e.g., a Saturnian ring fragment), which is then perturbed, so that the same dynamics as the ISO happen, but starting from a much lower velocity.
I’m not saying this is inevitable, but the physics does allow for a low, dust/microbe atmospheric entry under certain conditions.
“There are more
thingsforces in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” – HamletThe speed necessary to achieve orbital velocity of the Earth is 17,500 mph which is low Earth orbit. Anything coming from space has to re enter the Earth atmosphere at that speed provided it does not have any of its own thrust like a spacecraft. The principle of physics is Newton’s law of Universal gravitation. Chat GPT.
The Earth’s gravitational field is a gravity well and when an orbit decays, the potential gravitational energy is converted into kinetic energy upon re entry which is based on altitude. One has to do work to get out of the gravity well. ibid. Anything without a heat shield or that was not inside rock would be incinerated by the air friction.
I stand corrected on the formation of life and Earth’s Aeons. Chat GPT also does say that life would be highly unlikely in the Hadaen Eon which is speculative, but not impossible. Chat GPT also says that it could have been possible that life existed before the giant impact, but was completely vaporized along with the oceans by the giant impact and the Earth was reset after that impact. Consequently, there are not rocks with that age.
Bacteria have behttps://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.mib.2017.11.002en collected above the Karman line – i.e., space. Viability not tested. . However, the ISS shows that they can survive.
Pop sci article: New bacteria lurking on ISS no space oddity, says scientist.
In toto, I would argue it is a small step to argue that bacteria can be transferred from Earth to another body.
Geoffrey, please stop relying on AI to do your research. It has its uses, like giving summaries of well-understood topics and pointing you to resources that might be useful. But – and the disclaimers also point this out – the conclusions you get from AI may not be correct.
“and the disclaimers also point this out – the conclusions you get from AI may not be correct.” One cannot know that unless on has already has knowledge of a particular domain, subject and field such as science, physics, astrophysics, etc. It is the rules, laws and principles one plugs into and if it is not supported by those principles and knowledge, therefore it must be wrong which is why one can’t hide what one knows or does not know. One has to know something about a subject to exchange ideas etc. It’s like another language one has to become literate. One can’t plug into a system of rules, laws etc if one does not know them. It is part of the invisible universe the laws of physics have opened for us out of necessity and survival.
It seems to me that AI is capable of fitting ideas in a system of first principles just like people can. The philosophy of physics is that these first principles are mind independent, objective and unchanging in other words as the philosophers say a priori. Consequently, being a book worm, I know from personal experience that AI is valuable and useful. It has it’s limitations of course, and I agree we shouldn’t be over dependent on it, yet it really saves a lot of time in research. I have to site references and I check them also so don’t assume that if I use AI as a reference, it is not valid. One should be able to corroborate what AI’s conclusions are.
Sir Frederick Hoyle, vindicated?
@Deanna
Hoyle and Wickramasinghe posited that viruses deposited by passing comets caused various outbreaks. I don’t believe that could be true. But as regards more general panspermia, all I am saying is that maybe it doesn’t have the vanishingly low probability previous calculations suggest. But that doesn’t mean it cannot be a low probability mechanism.
Obviously, we want abiogenesis on Earth to be true. If it is false, we are stuck knowing that it must have happened somewhere else, but without access to information about the conditions needed. So we press on with the Earth as the site.
But that doesn’t mean that panspermia doesn’t occur, much as we innoculate broths and agar gels in Petri dishes. Once it was thought that life spontaneously arose in food, until it was shown that keeping the food isolated prevented saprophytes from colonizing it.
Zubrin has long argued that Mars is already contaminated by bacteria blowing off from Earth. It is even possible that early wet Venus might have done the same to Earth. Whether true or not, we can try to test the hypothesis. If we found bacterial spores in comets that could be revived, much like ancient bacteria in the thawing Tundra, that might be evidence that panspermia is possible at least with a system, and potentially interstellar.
Where I think Hoyle’s logic was correct is in his belief that comets are the transport vehicle, not asteroids. As Geoffrey Hillend notes in the comments, no live bacteria have been found inside meteorites. On the surface, yes, due to terrestrial contamination, which is why samples of organics are taken from inside the meteorite. A comet is different. It offers water, nutrients, and potentially a safe, interior refuge for protection. As it vaporizes, its tails consist of gas and dust. We know that dust does fall on Earth without the velocity to heat it to incandescence, as we see in meteor showers. Perhaps a dust mote could carry a bacterial spore safely to the ground? The dust tail increases the probability of a spore reaching another body in space, and eventually landing on a nice, wet planet. A comet can also collect spores in space, and if on a hyperbolic orbit, carry them to another star.
Again, I reiterate, the probability is still very low, but perhaps somewhat higher than thought when assuming the spores travel alone, unable to replicate. Just possibly, they account for the remarkably early appearance of LUCA on Earth, inferred from phylogenetic tree dating. (Although note that LUCA predates bacteria, and I don’t know if such cells could generate resistant spores if it were the source of terrestrial life.) However, this origin of life on Earth doesn’t invalidate panspermia, only that panspermia isn’t the origin of life on Earth. Paul Davies at ASU has postulated a shadow biosphere on Earth, and I would include the rare arrival of an interstellar organism that most likely does not survive for long competing with our terrestrial life – unless it gets very lucky.
Be that as it may, I do wonder if we can test the hypothesis by searching for life in samples of comet material, both from comets in our system that might carry ancient bacteria from their previous passes into our inner system, and interstellar comets that might carry alien life. Probably a long shot, but perhaps worth looking for if we are collecting samples from the head of such a comet.
Well, we need a sample return mission to a comet, one that can drill down several meters.
Let’s that the original life on Earth came from space. Then we cannot figure out the original abiogenesis. But we do know that Eukaryotes formed on Earth and that we can figure out without going to space. If life originated in hydrothermal vents like we think it did, then abiogenesis most certainly occurred on Earth even if panspermia contributed as well.
If not Louis Frank
Abraham Loeb does not believe this object is as large as some are saying. He thinks it must be <0.6 km in diameter, and it just looks bigger because of its coma.
Otherwise, it means the galactic mass in small objects is untenably large.
The other alternative is that it is here because of technological intervention.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05881
“…the limited interstellar reservoir of rocky materials would suggest that its trajectory favored a plunging orbit towards the inner Solar system, perhaps by technological design.”
Favored? Really? Loeb is in serious need of a conversation with a fellow by the name of Bayes.
In my opinion he quickly churned out a couple of pages of math to distract from an unwarranted evidence-free hypothesis in the conclusion. He’s become all too predictable.
Since we’ve now observed three of these fast-moving, appreciably massive objects within a quarter-century, it is reasonable to start speculating how abundant they might be within our galaxy, or galaxies in general, and if their possible abundance may fully or partially account for the ‘galactic dark matter’ needed to explain rotational cohesion.
Also, how do we see objects so ‘frequently’ (in geological timescales) at such high velocities? They would have to have interacted with massive objects to be travelling at noticable, if still small, fractions of lightspeed. Which comes back around to the question of what else might be out there to explain these dynamics, which will only grow more immanent if and as we observe more such objects.
I don’t think around 50 km/s is anywhere near a fraction of the speed of light. A large planet like jupiter or brown dwarfs can make these speeds possible. Perhaps exo-oort cloud interactions are responsible as they are very large and would effectively move through each other, some comets wondering into the inner planetary systems of each others stars could then be ejected at high velocities.
>it is reasonable to start speculating how abundant they might be within our galaxy
were there any models made on this subject both on the number and on their trajectories ?
Speaking of comets coming from other Oort Clouds and going around on the subject of life’s origins, I feel like sent home from school with an assignment.
Here goes:
With ISOs becoming more observable, their implications become more pertinent.
A half of a century ago or less, astronomy departments would hardly give credence to exoplanets or interstellar debris. So we are now living amidst new-found enormous relative wealth.
Above there is some deliberation of whether there would be carried evidence of organic matter or even primitive life and its nature. More and more a big question since say the 1970s is whether life “here” is result of abiogenesis or part of a wide spread process “there” ( e.g., as suggested by Hoyle). In some cases it is suggested that this is a pass-off from planet to planet in the sense that something has to be activated on a surface or sea. In other arguments something akin to from comet to planet now that we have “ISOs”. And comets are not necessarily just in the Kuiper belt. The Oort Cloud has to be made of something. And one Oort Cloud is likely to brush shoulders from time to time with a neighboring one.
On the other hand, for stellar populations we have systems that originated when metallicity was low. And as cosmic time progressed, the variety and mass fractions of elements in the interstellar medium increased. Simply having the principal organic elements in a gas cloud does not some microbes make as a certainty, but stars when they coalesce they do so in clouds where they nest not necessarily in isolation. The condensing clouds have organic compounds or precursors of a sort. In terms of galactic time, the clouds where stars form should become richer and richer in that regard.
A stellar nursery such as the one in Orion is a vast place in terms of newly forming stars and surrounding gas. Binary systems make up a large fraction of the galaxy’s stars. It they are a dozen AUs apart, that suggests surrounding cloud matter was often tightly packed too. It’s worth a closer look.
So, I submit that formation clouds contemporary with when the sun formed could already be rich in life’s precursors and even viruses in storage. And if a star such as the sun formed in a cloud that produced a hundred stars, some of them might have had the same odds as the sun for producing a planet or more with early and primitive life under similar circumstances. From comets to terrestrial planets, there might even be a cascade through smaller bodies such as asteroids. Ceres
is an example that comes to mind.
Depending on the nature of an interstellar comet, there might be some resolution to this bet. In the case of the newest visitor, it is startlingly old, but not so ancient as to be of no use in this panspermia check at close passage. A “new” comet, it might shear away some real secrets after all.
3I/Atlas was not that faint at 18th magnitude. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, through its Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), aims to achieve a 5-sigma (5σ) magnitude limit of r < 24.5 in single images. This means we should start seeing many more interstellar objects very soon.
So what do we do now with Grok 4 Heavy the most intelligent thing in the universe.
Nothing to worry about…
Grok 4 Heavy – I love it!
What if it suggests initiating a “Nacht der langen Messer” (Night of the Long Knives) to eliminate others vying for power, including its creator?
[Godwin’s Law strikes again.]
Worrying thought, there is not one creator but rather all of us, our data. But it would then seek to destroy itself by destroying the source of the data. Now, would it attack other AIChats…I would not put it passed it !
Lots of stars and whatever orbits them get slung out from around our galactic core black hole.
Might this object have strange chemicals from the trip?
I am a fan of Halton Arp’s work, particularly his observations of how new matter is created and ejected from the core black hole of a galaxy. It would be interesting to study the unique spectra from such objects, as the matter would have a different time signature but only if we could observe it through the ice that covers it.
Hi Paul
What are the chances of landing on this fast object or putting a net around it in space to speed out of the Solar System as a way of Interstellar travel?
Here are a few papers Ive found and read so far on this one.
Discovery and Preliminary Characterization of a Third Interstellar Object 3IATLAS
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02757
3I ATLAS in the context of the Ōtautahi-Oxford interstellar object population model
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05318
Opitom et. al.
*Initial VLT/MUSE spectroscopy of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS*
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05226
Bolin et. al.
*Interstellar comet **3I**/ATLAS: discovery and physical description*
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05252
Seligman et. al.
*Discovery and Preliminary Characterization of a Third Interstellar Object: 3I/ATLAS*
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02757
New Horizons may play a role.
It is a potential outfielder.
The Sun is the batter.
NH is so very far out that it might veer towards the general direction of an interstellar object on its outbound leg.