Episode Details

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Déjà vu? Professor Avi Loeb has sparked controversy by suggesting - again - that a recently detected interstellar body passing through the Solar System (3I/ATLAS) could be an alien spacecraft. Today, we dive into what he his claiming and whether it holds up - just the science.

Written & presented by Prof. David Kipping, edited by Jorge Casas. Special thanks to Jason Wright for fact checking.

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THANK-YOU to D. Smith, C. Bottaccini, D. Daughaday, S. Brownlee, E. West, T. Zajonc, A. De Vaal, M. Elliott, B. Daniluk, S. Vystoropskyi, S. Lee, Z. Danielson, C. Fitzgerald, C. Souter, M. Gillette, J. Rockett, M. Sanford, T. Donkin, A. Schoen, K. Dabrowski, J. Armstrong, B. Smith, J. Bergman, C. Macdonald, M. Hedlund, N. Corwin, K. Howard, G. Metts, R. Provost, G. Fullwood, N. De Haan, R. Williams, E. Garland, R. Lovely, D. Compos, F. Demopoulos, T. Edris, M. O'Brien, D. Lee, M. Czirr, I. Williams, B. Reese, A. Nimmerjahn, C. Seay, D. Johnson, L. Cunningham, M. Morrow, M. Campbell, B. Devermont, P. Borisoff, H. Schiff, J. Cos, C. Hansen, R. Chaffee, A. Ortiz, B. McMillan, B. Cartmell, J. Bryant, J. Obioma, M. Zeiler, S. Murray, S. Patterson, C. Kennedy, G. Le Saint, W. Ruf, A. Kochkov, B. Langley, P. Stevenson, T. Ford, A. Laroye, I. Venzor, R. Raszka, B. Gaalen, J. Alley, D. Aron, G. Thomsen, S. Shardool, A. Phan Le, N. Offor, A. Huch, J. Morrison, C. Fitzsimmons, W. Smith, A. Twyman, B. Burgess, B. Bueche, D. Hoffman & J. Murph.

REFERENCES
► Avi Loeb's blog: https://avi-loeb.medium.com
► Hibberd, Crowl & Loeb 2025, "Is the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Alien Technology?": https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12213
► Loeb 2018, "Six Strange Facts About`Oumuamua": https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.08832
► Amrhein et al. 2019, "Scientists rise up against statistical significance", Nature, 567, 305-307: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00857-9
► Tonry et al. 2018: "ATLAS: A High-Cadence All-Sky Survey System", PASP, 130, 064505: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.00879
► Loeb, Hibberd & Crowl 2025: "Intercepting 3I/ATLAS at Closest Approach to Jupiter with the Juno spacecraft": https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21402
► Loeb & MacLeod 2024, "Interstellar meteors from the tidal disruption of rocky planets
on eccentric orbits around M dwarfs", A&A, 686, A123: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.09399
► Hopkins et al. 2025, "From a Different Star: 3I/ATLAS in the context of the Ōtautahi-Oxford interstellar object population model", ApJL accepted: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05318
► Belyakov et al. 2025, "Palomar and Apache Point Spectrophotometry of Interstellar Comet 3I/Atlas", RNAAS, 9, 149: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11720
► Jewitt et al. 2025, "Hubble Space Telescope Observations of the Interstellar Interloper 3I/ATLAS": https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02934
► Dorman et al. 2013, "The Spatial Distribution of C2, C3 and NH in Comet 2P/Encke", ApJ, 778, 140: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0004-637X/778/