3I/Atlas photo captured from Mars? 'Perfect glowing cylinder' triggers debate

Interstellar comet 3I/Atlas flew by Mars on October 3, but we have yet to get any images of the mysterious bodies that the orbiter would have captured. However, a photo of the object taken by NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover is doing the rounds on social media. It shows a bright cylindrical object zooming through the sky. The odd shape has triggered fresh curiosity about 3I/Atlas and whether it is really a comet, or an "alien mothership", as Avi Loeb claims. An X user wrote, "A perfect glowing cylinder drifting across the Martian sky. No dust plume. No fragmentation. Just… structure." Ever since 3I/Atlas was spotted on July 1, scientists across the world have been in awe of the interstellar visitor that has been displaying several anomalies. Its shape, as seen in the images released by NASA, is being flagged as another anomaly. However, according to a scientist, there is a perfect explanation for why the object appears like a cylinder.

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Loeb explains why 3I/Atlas appears like a cylinder

Harvard scientist Loeb explains that the strange shape in the photos does not conclusively prove that 3I/Atlas is a spaceship. The photo was taken when it was at a distance of about 38 million kilometres from Mars. It was taken by the Navcam on the Perseverance rover. He says the photo was taken "at a spatial scale of about 12,500 kilometres at the distance of 3I/ATLAS from Mars." Loeb says this shows that the stripe is about 50,000 kilometres long. He once again claimed that data from the SPHEREx space observatory shows that the object has a diameter of 46 kilometres. The picture taken by the NAVCAM is a thousand times longer than this upper limit and, "therefore, must be an artefact of a long integration time given that the source moves across the Martian sky."

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He corroborates this data with the pictures taken by the Hubble telescope on July 21, 202. If 3I/Atlas was 50,000 kilometres, "it would have occupied an angular size of 23 arcseconds in the Hubble Space Telescope image", he says. Instead, it "appears smaller by at least an order of magnitude in the actual Hubble image." Loeb wrote that this suggests that the long stripe was simply "generated by the integration time used to make the composite Navcam image" while 3I/ATLAS moved across the Martian sky. So the stripe likely appears elongated because hundreds of pictures taken by the NAVCAM were stacked over a total time interval of about 10 minutes.

3I/Atlas anomalies

Ever since the interstellar object was officially discovered on July 1, several anomalies have been noted. Its trajectory was the biggest giveaway that it is travelling from outside our solar system. The path brings it close to several planets moving in a straight line. It is also believed to be enormous, around 46 kilometres big and with a mass of 33 billion tonnes. 3I/Atlas is also moving at an extremely fast pace - 60,000 km/sec, or 220,000 km/hour. Avi Loeb says it is impossible for such a huge object to move at this pace. The gases released by it are also not in line with the rules of Physics.