FOLLOW US

By Samuel Lopez
USA Herald

Avi Loeb did not mince words after reviewing NASA’s newly released SOHO/LASCO C3 images of 3I/ATLAS. He said there was “nothing major in terms of their insights as to the nature of the object,” adding that the imagery appeared “fuzzy” and offered “no new insight.”

Loeb acknowledged that NASA detected hydrogen using MAVEN’s spectrograph, which confirms the presence and breakup of water molecules. However, he emphasized that the real story lies in the data associated with the comet’s jets, noting that multiple jets are firing in different directions and that the scientific community still lacks a high-resolution telescope image capable of settling the deeper questions.

To understand NASA’s newly released SOHO image, a rigorous forensic review was conducted on the frame captured between October 15 and 26, 2025. The image is faint, heavily textured by SOHO’s dense solar-coronal background, and shows 3I/ATLAS only as a subtle brightening in the center.

Even with careful digital enhancement and layered contrast analysis, the central object behaves more like a soft sphere than a sharply defined cometary core. Nothing in the image indicates rapid spin, rotational smearing, or any clear structural divisions inside the nucleus. The central brightness holds its shape, but its outline is swallowed by low-resolution blur, creating a uniform glow rather than any distinct architecture.

A mild asymmetry does appear around the nucleus. There is a slightly thicker haze drifting to the left side of the object. This could be a very faint dust release, or it might simply be SOHO’s camera noise along the coronal gradient. The image is too degraded to determine which is true.

The lack of observable features does not mean those features are absent. It simply means this camera lacks the precision to reveal them. The instrument was designed primarily for detecting large, bright, sun-skirting objects through a saturated corona, not for resolving fine-scaled cometary morphology.

Searches for signs of acceleration, brightening, or fragmentation also yielded nothing definitive. There are no directional streaks, no decoupled fragments, and no pulses of reflected light that would suggest sudden motion or activity.

If 3I/ATLAS is accelerating or maneuvering in a way that hints at non-gravitational forces, the SOHO image cannot confirm it. The background noise overwhelms the minute details that higher-powered ground-based telescopes have already confirmed.

Most of what appears around 3I/ATLAS in this image is not comet structure at all but coronagraphic interference—diffuse patterns produced by scattered sunlight interacting with the instrument’s internal optical components. The result is an image that detects the comet but cannot accurately describe it.

The honest conclusion is straightforward: nothing in this SOHO image confirms the presence of multiple jets, anti-tails, non-gravitational acceleration, or any technological interpretation. Yet nothing in it disproves these possibilities either. The resolution is simply too low to support or challenge any theory. Loeb’s critique stands uncontested. The images are blurry, scientifically thin, and ultimately uninformative. The real mystery of 3I/ATLAS remains in the higher-resolution data that the world is still waiting to see.

OFFICIAL STATEMENTS / VERIFIED QUOTES:

“This image was… fuzzy. There was no new insight offered by them.” — Avi Loeb

“The data is far more interesting. It shows jets… multiple jets going in different directions.” — Avi Loeb