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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.

• First, the object’s retrograde trajectory aligns within five degrees of the ecliptic plane — a 0.2% likelihood.
• Second, unlike the behavior of familiar comets whose geometry creates the illusion of a sunward jet, 3I/ATLAS repeatedly exhibited a true sunward anti-tail in July, August, and early November — an impossibility under standard models.
• Third, its nucleus carries a mass a million times larger than 1I/ʻOumuamua and a thousand times larger than 2I/Borisov, yet moves faster than both, placing the odds of such an interstellar visitor at under 0.1%.
• Fourth, its arrival was timed so precisely that it passed near Mars, Venus, and Jupiter while remaining unobservable from Earth at its closest approach to the Sun — a 0.005% probability.
• Fifth, spectroscopy revealed a gas plume dominated by nickel over iron, resembling industrially manufactured nickel alloys rather than anything observed in natural comets.
• Sixth, the plume contains only four percent water by mass, an extraordinarily low content for a comet.
• Seventh, it displays extreme negative polarization unseen in any other known comet, including Borisov.
• Eighth, it entered the solar system from the same region of sky where the famous “Wow! Signal” originated in 1977.
• Ninth, near perihelion, it brightened faster than any known comet and appeared bluer than the Sun.
• Tenth, its sunlight-heated surface should not be able to produce the massive sunward and anti-solar jets we observe without requiring an impossibly large surface area.
• Eleventh, its non-gravitational acceleration near perihelion required it to evaporate at least thirteen percent of its mass, yet preliminary imagery shows the object intact.
• And now, twelfth, the jets maintain stable orientation across a million kilometers in multiple directions despite the object’s measured rotation rate.

Taken together, these anomalies do not prove anything on their own. But collectively, they form the most unusual observational profile ever recorded for an interstellar visitor. Loeb’s Loeb Scale — a ranking system he devised to quantify how strongly an object deviates from natural expectations — currently places 3I/ATLAS at 4+, meaning “highly anomalous.”

“If the measured speed and mass flux of the jets are inconsistent with warming by sunlight of a natural comet, then I will raise the Loeb Scale rank to a higher value than 4,” Loeb writes. “The rank will reach a value of 10 if there is evidence for new objects near Earth or Mars that are related to 3IATLAS.”

He has not yet updated the ranking in light of the new jet orientation data and is waiting for imminent measurements of the jets’ speed and mass flux.

If those measurements align with natural comet physics, he will reduce the score. But if they do not, he has stated openly that he will raise the scale beyond 4, potentially toward 10 — a score he reserves for an object with “evidence of technological activity near Earth or Mars.” In that sense, the stakes of this next data window could not be higher.

There is also a growing public frustration that cannot be ignored. During the recent government shutdown, NASA captured HiRISE images of 3I/ATLAS on October 2 and 3. NASA has released nothing. Now that the government is reopened, NASA has posted new images of a Martian dune field to its website — proving the pipeline is functioning — but still no HiRISE images of 3I/ATLAS.

Scientists, journalists, and the public have the right to see the data that may clarify whether this object is natural, exotic, or something unprecedented in the record of astronomy. When the only high-resolution images of the most anomalous interstellar object ever observed remain locked behind institutional silence, trust erodes. That silence becomes part of the story.

As 3I/ATLAS recedes from the Sun and moves toward its December 19 Closest approach to Earth window, more data will arrive — from radar, spectroscopy, photometry, and deep-stacked imagery. The jet dynamics, the rotation period, the mass loss, and the composition will all be re-measured. Right now, we are standing in the narrow gap between what we know and what we fear we do not yet understand. The next few weeks may determine which way that balance breaks.

We will continue monitoring 3I/ATLAS closely as new data arrives and will bring readers every verified fact as soon as it is available.