Rapid Brightening of 3I/Atlas Ahead of Perihelion
54 comments
·October 30, 2025ahmedfromtunis
tcdent
To be clear, we're not looking through the Sun at the object. We're looking past the Sun at the object through a telescope that is positioned to observe the Sun, for the most recent imagery.
I agree with you, but I have been experimenting with image processing using the data available from this satellite (as a hobbyist). Honestly, while it's impressive that we gather data from a piece of technology that's floating in space, the resolution of this is nothing to write home about. If I take anything away from my brief amount of experience with this, it's that we still have a long way to go in terms of the quality of our imaging of our surrounding space.
I haven't fully finished my processing yet and still need to tune the wavelength and account for some drift, but this is basically the state-of-the-art: https://tcdent-pub.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/3i_atlas_10302...
ctoth
Anybody else feel like there're just ... too many active plotlines?
It is/isn't the Singularity while we are going and not going into WW III, while Rama is maybe zooming by, while Modern Rome does the whole fall of the Republic nonsense, or maybe doesn't! While the H5N1 thing is still churning away reassorting in pigs!
Narrative superposition is exhausting.
pavel_lishin
Don't forget a bunch of infected rhesus monkeys escaping an overturned truck.
null
kakacik
Turn off active screen devices and go for a (very long) walk. News are exhausting only if you allow them to be.
ctoth
I appreciate what you're trying to say here, but this was more an infovore glorying in how weird everything is than someone who has too much screen time (I don't, in fact, even use a screen.)
But also sometimes monitoring the world is useful. I'm very glad I was paying attention in February 2020, for instance!
hollerith
>(I don't, in fact, even use a screen.)
I don't understand. How did you write this comment?
iliketowatch
oh my science! it's just like in Ant Man 3 on iMax
JDazzle
Just a heads up that you likely shifted into a parallel universe.. iMax doesn't exist; we have HBO Max
Welcome! I certainly hope this universe is better than your original one
chasd00
One of my (highly educated and successful) buddies thinks it some sort of alien interstellar probe. I told my 13 year, who keeps up with these kinds of things, and asked what he thinks. He just kind of stared at me and then said "i think it's a comet from outside the solar system." and went back to playing DCS. heh from the mouth of babes..
baggy_trough
Clearly your son has not studied its orbital path near 2 major planets.
ceejayoz
What in said path would you like to highlight?
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ESA%E2%80%99s_Mars_a...
withinboredom
Someone really aught to add a picture at the bottom of this article with a gif of aliens saying "take me to your leader"...
baggy_trough
It goes very close to 2 major planets. What's the chance of that?
bashtoni
For those unaware, there are a ton of AI generated videos across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook of physicist Brian Cox saying this is an alien spacecraft:
https://www.ign.com/articles/physicist-brian-cox-thanks-yout...
zarmin
slightly off-topic thought experiment that's been on my mind lately:
to us, the sun appears to be the size of, let's say, a quarter held at arm's length. this is at 93M miles (1AU, or ~8 light minutes) distance. if we moved the sun 100 miles away from earth, it would take up the entire sky. now in the other direction, if we doubled the distance, to 2AU, it would appear to us as half its normal size and 1/4 as bright (irradiance follows inverse square law). at 3AU the sun would be 1/9 as bright and 3x smaller than a quarter. at 100AU, we're talking about brightness of 1/100^2 (one ten-thousandth) the sun's apparent brightness. with me so far?
Sirius A: the brightest star we can see; 25x more luminous than the sun; 2x the size of the sun; 8.6 light YEARS distance (544,000AU) from earth.
if we moved the sun to the same distance as Sirius A, it would appear 296 BILLION times dimmer and 544,000 times smaller. yet Sirius A is easily visible - the brightest star in our sky - despite being only 25x more luminous and 2x larger.
do you see the discrepancy? 25x more luminous doesn't compensate for a 296-billion-fold brightness loss. The numbers we are given don't make sense, not even close. (and this is without considering diffusion, which would make the discrepancy even worse.) i'm not proposing an explanation or a modification to the model, i just think the data don't make sense.
GolfPopper
>The numbers we are given don't make sense
These are all numbers you just provided, with no source for them.
But even using your numbers, 300 billion is 3x10^11. The Sun provides about 10^5 lux, while starlight overall provides about 10^-4 lux[1], which is a difference of 10^9, meaning the difference between "all the starlight on a dark night" and "just the starlight from Sirius" would be around 10^2, which... seems about right?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28illumin...
ceejayoz
Yeah, people get really messed up by just how good our eyes are. (For a close-to-home example, people think indoor plants get a lot closer to sunlight-level amounts than they really do.)
We can spot a single photon in the right conditions. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12172
ceejayoz
Don't worry, Avi Loeb is on it. https://avi-loeb.medium.com/3i-atlas-rapidly-brightens-and-g...
"Does it employ a power source that is hotter than the Sun?"
Sigh.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2
I don't like to discourage questions like that, because they kill curiosity. We know what the likely answer is, but reasonable assumptions are just that. Assumptions. Why not let mind wander about the exciting ( if somewhat hard to consider as possible ) lines of thinking.
dekhn
He moved from merely asking questions to promoting an unsupported claim without any real evidence (repeatedly). he's not curious.
TheBlight
Planetary scientist academics are angry because he's getting all of the attention and it isn't even in the field he's most known for previously. Even smart humans are still humans.
dylan604
There's a difference in asking questions and pushing as fact with no evidence. It swings both ways
ares623
Plus he is an authority figure with a captive audience. He has a much higher responsibility than the average person speculating.
gojomo
What is Loeb pushing as fact with no evidence? Can you provide a representative quote?
ceejayoz
[flagged]
m4r1k
Dr. Avi has a pretty clear point and he goes into details on the JRE released just yesterday. https://youtu.be/EaAun27gftk
What most stand out is the sheer amount of closed mind people in the accademia, Avi is not afraid of making suggestions of what it might be and even saying “if it turns out of being a rock, so be it”.
ceejayoz
Just to be clear, "here he is shilling it to Joe Rogan" was intended to support his theory?
> even saying “if it turns out of being a rock, so be it”
I don't doubt it! He'll get another chance the next time we spot another one.
gaoshan
That's a pretty wild, and public, hypothetical for someone with his standing at Harvard.
gojomo
Why would someone "with his standing at Harvard" be expected to avoid "wild, and public, hypothetical[s]"?
Does everyone at any prestigious institution have some duty to remain mundane * conventional in all their musings?
Is there any reason to think such hypotheticals are, on net, more harmful than helpful?
Isn't tenure (liek Loeb's) designed to encourage a fearlessness around topics & speech?
CamperBob2
Wouldn't be especially interesting if it did. Even a mantis shrimp can do that: https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/og0n3b/t...
kulahan
This doesn't mean everyone is overhyping the comet, it means you're underhyping the mantis shrimp. There are a number of absolutely unimaginable miracles of nature on Earth.
ceejayoz
It would be deeply interesting for a comet to have a power source of any kind.
CamperBob2
Maybe it's a chunk of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przybylski%27s_Star -- which admittedly is pretty darned strange in itself.
all2
A volcanic comet?
darig
[dead]
dylan604
Maybe it's being driven by Bat Boy?
I miss the days when tabloid fodder stayed in the tabloids.
How cool is it that, as a species, we developed tools to allow us to continue watching an interstellar object zapping the void on the other side of the sun!!!
Seeing how everything is going, though, I strongly feel like we peaked as a species and that, while we'll continue up for a (short) while, the downgrade is just inevitable.