Comet 3I/ATLAS created an enormous amount of online speculation last year.#
Now it is safely making its way out of the solar system, I thought I’d pick apart what went on here to separate the hype from the fact.
July 1, 2025: 3I/ATLAS was discovered by the ATLAS telescope in Chile.
The path of this comet was very interesting as it looked like it wasn’t in a usual comet orbit around the Sun.
It was approaching us from interstellar space, so it is a recent visitor to the Solar system and has never been close to our Sun.
It was predicted to pass through our solar system before receding back into deep space.
The comet was moving too fast for the Sun’s gravitational field to capture it.
The diagram below shows the path of the comet through our solar system.
It passed inside Jupiter’s orbit at the bottom of the diagram and came closest to the Sun (Perihelion) just inside Mars’ orbit, never to return following a hyperbolic trajectory.
This wasn’t the first solar system interloper, as there had been two others.
- 1I/Oumuamua — discovered in 2017, the first known interstellar object detected passing through our solar system.
Brightness variations as the solid object rotated led astronomers to believe the object was highly elongated.
This object showed no cometary activity, so it was likely made of rock. - 2I/Borisov — discovered in 2019, the first clearly active interstellar comet, as a classic comet coma and tail were observed.
Together with 3I/ATLAS, these are the only confirmed interstellar objects observed to date.
Early-Mid July 2025: Initial observations confirmed it was a comet with cometary features (coma and tail).
However, Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb began speculating, wrongly, that it could potentially be extraterrestrial technology.
September 2025: The comet was still a reasonable distance from the Sun and hadn’t developed that charactersistic tail we associate with comets.
Claims intensified. Loeb published writings suggesting that if the comet didn’t show a tail, it could be an artificial object “sent towards the inner solar system by design.” He suggested it might use a “reverse Solar Oberth manoeuvre” so it will become bound to the Sun and potentially reach Earth by November-December 2025, with “potentially dire consequences for humanity.”
He certainly knows how to generate internet traffic (and online earnings), so he is a very clever man. But still WRONG!!!
The media certainly did not help matters with articles titled as shown below.
October 22-27, 2025: A month later, we reached the peak of online hysteria. Social media exploded with alien spacecraft theories about Comet I3.
On October 24, claims circulated about it being a “black swan event” or “Trojan horse”, whatever those are meant to be.
A viral post from an account claiming to be “US Homeland Security News” falsely stated that Dr Aris Thorne confirmed it was made of “artificial composite material.”
Whoever he might be. 🤷♂️ Of course, no change was seen in the path of the comet, but that didn’t stop things getting even more out of hand.
The comet started to develop a dusty head and tail, typical of a comet.
Comet tails generally point away from the Sun, but one or more of the “tails” were not pointing away from the Sun.
“It’s a rocket engine kicked in to slow it down to get it into position” they said.
Thinking about what went on here. This icy comet has been in deep frozen space for millennia.
It was approaching the Sun, and the core was heating up.
This heating causes the solid to turn directly into gas, a process called sublimation.
The side facing the Sun will heat up more, so there will be a lot more activity on that side.
Therefore, some of that ejected dust and gas, if exploding out from that side, will initially be thrown out towards the Sun.
After reaching a certain distance, the solar wind will eventually win, forcing the comet’s gas and dust to change direction and form a tail on the opposite side from the Sun.
October 29, 2025: As predicted, the comet reached its closest approach to the Sun, just inside Mars’ orbit.
They then started to say that “Comet 3I has now started to examine Mars”.
Can you see a pattern here? One theory falls flat.
3I didn’t slow down and collide with Earth, so they replace that with another incorrect scenario to keep folks interested.
By this time, the motion of the comet and the Earth, going around in its orbit, meant that they were now on opposite sides of the Sun.
The comet was therefore hidden from Earth’s view behind the Sun during this critical period.
Of course, this was another thing that fuelled even more speculation.
They now started saying, “It’s purposely hiding behind the Sun, so we can’t keep an eye on what it’s doing.”
In late October, it began to emerge from behind the Sun and out of the twilight in the morning sky.
It was now fading as it made its way out along the same path we had seen at the beginning of its journey.
Whatever it was doing had not changed its speed or direction in all that time.
November-December 2025: NASA and other scientists firmly debunked the claims.
Studies showed the comet behaves exactly like a natural comet with normal outgassing, composition, and movement.
Radio telescopes searching for alien signals from the comet detected nothing.
I managed to capture an image of the comet on the 30th of November.
I was very excited to capture this one, and it certainly looks like every other comet to me.
Things have gone very quiet among the conspiracy theorists now, and they have fallen back onto something like “3I has completed its mission and is now on its way home”.
Anyone who says otherwise is either an idiot, following a useless trend, or a charlatan, spreading misinformation for monetary gain.
But they are very clever as they’ve probably made a lot of money spreading their rubbish.
I do not try and debunk their pathetic theories online, as doing so only gives them more views and comments.
This will only add to their counts, fuelling the algorithms in social media, so their tripe, (I’ve used a more polite word than I wanted to), spreads even further.
The scientific consensus throughout has been clear:
3I/ATLAS is simply a comet, albeit a fascinating interstellar visitor.
“But who believes scientists anyway?”, they say.
“You’re all in on it and covering things up.”
Even members of my family accuse me of that at times.
But believe me, if I did manage to spot something that “was just not right”, I’d soon be jumping up and down and trying to get the facts out there to spread the word.
Dave
I think I have all the facts correct here, but happy to hear from someone if I’ve got something wrong.