Key Takeaways
- Something is holding its structure together when physics says it shouldn’t.
- The newest images don’t clarify the mystery — they sharpen it.
- What we’re learning now may redefine our assumptions about what moves through our solar system.
LOS GATOS, CA – The newest image of 3IATLAS, captured on November 9, 2025, shows something that should not be possible if this interstellar object is a natural comet. What the astronomers F. Niebling and M. Buechner documented is a web of tightly focused, needle-straight jets extending more than a million kilometers into space — all maintaining their orientation with almost eerie precision.
I have spent months reporting on 3IATLAS, documenting its deviations, its surprises, its unexplained physics, and its mounting list of anomalies. But this development — what Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb is now calling the twelfth anomaly — introduces a new level of scientific tension.
According to Loeb’s newly published analysis, the jets should have smeared into blurred arcs due to the object’s known rotation period of 16.16 hours, measured back in July and August. Instead, the jets remain razor-straight. That alone forces a difficult question: how does a rotating million-ton interstellar mass produce straight, stable jets stretching a million kilometers into space without them twisting or spiraling as the body spins?
Loeb’s breakdown makes the dilemma clear enough for even non-scientists to follow. If 3I/ATLAS were a typical comet, the gases that escape when sunlight warms pockets of buried ice would travel at around 400 meters per second. At that speed, it takes about a month for the gas to travel a million kilometers — meaning the jets documented now contain material launched over many rotation cycles.
Natural physics predicts that these jets should curve, bend, or smear because the nucleus would have rotated underneath them dozens of times. But the jets do not curve. They do not bend. They hold orientation as if guided, coordinated, or stabilized by something far more controlled than simple outgassing.
Loeb considers natural explanations, but each collapses under its own physics. Solar illumination stimulating outgassing in specific angles could, in principle, produce repeating pulses — “peas in a pod,” as Loeb describes — spaced roughly twenty-three thousand kilometers apart, one for each full rotation.
But the images do not show a 43-pearl chain of pulses marching outward from a sunlit crater. They show long, continuous, coherent jets. Worse for the natural-illumination explanation, some of the jets run away from the Sun — something sunlight-triggered ice sublimation cannot create.
Another possibility is that the jets are not jets at all but the dissolved trails of fragments that exploded off the object near perihelion. But two days after the images showing the apparent jets, astronomers D. Jewitt and J. Luu imaged the nucleus and found it intact, seemingly contradicting the fragmentation hypothesis.
Loeb then acknowledges the scenario that no one in mainstream astronomy wants to approach without extreme caution: the possibility of technological thrusters preserving directional stability for navigation. His statement is measured, scientific, and careful — but it is unmistakably on the table.
For months, Loeb has compiled the growing list of anomalies surrounding 3I/ATLAS. His goal is not to sensationalize but to establish, with numerical precision, how improbable each feature is if the object is a natural comet. The list has now reached twelve.
