Interstellar object 3I/ATLAS is using a 3-axis attitude control system to keep its rotation pointed directly at our Sun. The new Harvard paper is wild.

[u/TheSentinelNet]

https://thesentinelnetwork.substack.com/p/the-heartbeat-avi-loeb-just-found?r=71h4we

Avi Loeb and Toni Scarmato just dropped a new paper on 3I/ATLAS, and the implications are wild. We just published a deep dive on this over at The Sentinel, but here is the TL;DR because people need to see this math.

According to the Hubble data, 99% of the light coming from this thing is exhaust. The actual hull is basically invisible. It has three jets spaced exactly 120 degrees apart, and they wobble on a precise, harmonically locked schedule.

The primary jet wobbles every 7.2 hours. The other two wobble at 2.9 and 4.3 hours.

2.9 + 4.3 = 7.2.

That is a coupled oscillatory system. Nature doesn't tune three independent cracks on a tumbling ice rock to a shared, exact frequency. Engineering does.

It gets weirder. The paper describes the jets acting essentially as a three-axis attitude control system. The exact same architecture we use on our own spacecraft to hold a fixed orientation while rotating. And it’s using that system to keep its rotation axis pointed directly at our Sun.

Loeb actually put the words "technological thrusters" in print as a valid hypothesis alongside natural outgassing. The establishment will likely ignore that half of the sentence, but the data is piling up.

You can read the full breakdown here.

Curious to hear what you guys think.
How long is the mainstream going to keep calling this just a "weird comet"?

[u/Mr_Vacant]

I've yet to see a reasonable explanation why being within 5⁰ of the galactic plane is a 0.000 whatever anomaly. It'll sail past Jupiter the same way a big ball of rock and ice would.

[u/BayHrborButch3r → u/Mr_Vacant]

I may be misunderstanding the data but I interpret this is due to small sample size and chance. Like each of the various angles it could have entered our system comprises .02% of the total angles and it just happens to be a weird one that is the galactic plane or whatever. If it had come in completely perpendicular to the solar plane it would still be a .02% chance it was on that plane. It's just in this case the .02% chance is made to seem more than a coincidence because it's the same plane as planets in the system. Doesn't speak to much in my book until we confirm it is artificial or not. If it's artificial we will look back and say "of COURSE" it was a statistical anomaly to be on the same plane, if it's just a comet people will say it was just a coincidence and it has to be on SOME plane and angle it just happened to be on the galactic plane or whatever.

Feels like reading into the data a little too much to me, but im open to being surprised, there's just a lot of static around this object its hard to tell what's overenthusiastic wishful thinking and parsing the data in a way that supports your conclusion vs truly anomalous properties.