NASA announced today their plans to hold a special media event on Wednesday to discuss interstellar mystery object 3I/Atlas –an object some believe, including a leading astrophysicist at Harvard University, is an alien spacecraft. It’s also possible the object is just a very unusual comet. To help answer the question “what is it?” and to help the scientific community better study it, NASA plans to release never-before-seen images of the object and answer questions at the media event. The media event is scheduled for Wednesday, November 19, at 3 pm ET.
The 3I/Atlas Special Media Event will take place at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The event will air on NASA+, the NASA app, the agency’s website, NASA’s YouTube Channel, and on Amazon Prime.
Participants in this special event include NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya, Nicky Fox, the Associate Administrator for Scient Mission Directorate, Shawn Domagal-Goldman, Acting Director – Astrophysics Division, and Tom Statler, Lead Scientist for Solar System Small Bodies.
NASA says, “Assets within NASA’s science missions give the United States the unique capability to observe 3I/ATLAS almost the entire time it passes through our celestial neighborhood, and study – with complementary scientific instruments and from different directions – how the comet behaves. These assets include both spacecraft across the solar system, as well as ground-based observatories.”
This mysterious object was discovered on July 1, 2025 by the NASA-funded ATLAS survey telescope at Río Hurtado, Chile. This newly discovered object was entering the inner Solar System at a speed of 140,000 mph relative to the Sun and was located 325 million miles from Earth. It was initially moving in the sky along the border of the constellations Serpens Cauda and Sagittarius, near the galactic plane. These initial observations initially suggested that the object could be on a highly eccentric path that might come close to Earth’s orbit, which led the International Astronomical Union Minor Planet Center to list the object on the Near-Earth Object Confirmation Page until the orbit could be confirmed. Because it is the third confirmed interstellar object passing through the Solar System, it was given the prefix “3 I” after 2I, known as Borisov, and 1I known as ‘Oumaumua.
However, the interstellar object is not behaving like a typical comet. The object had an unexplained increase in speed after passing close to the Sun. And unlike normal comets, 3I/ATLAS shows no visible gas or dust emissions that could explain its acceleration. If anything, it is exhibiting unusual jets both towards and away from the Sun which also defies expectations of a comet.
One scientists that has been very vocal about this interstellar object is Avi Loeb; he believes it may be an alien spacecraft. Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
The famous astrophysicist continues to publish on his blog on Medium his thoughts on this new object, including things that suggest it’s more of a manufactured object than a natural comet. His posts on Medium can be found here: https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
“Given the large-scale jets reported recently, the fact that 3I/ATLAS remains a single body is surprising for a natural comet. In particular, the large-scale image of 3I/ATLAS reported here on November 9, 2025 shows jets reaching out to ~1 million kilometers towards the Sun and ~3 million kilometers in the opposite direction, as discussed here. For a natural comet, the outflow velocity of the jets is expected to be 0.4 kilometers per second, of order the sound speed of gas at the distance of 3I/ATLAS from the Sun. At that speed, the jets must have persisted over a timescale of 1–3 months,” writes Loeb. He also adds later in his entry, “Technological thrusters which point their exhaust towards the Sun would accelerate away from the Sun. This post-perihelion maneuver might be employed by a spacecraft that aims to gain speed rather than slow down through the gravitational assist from the Sun,” writes Loeb.
Scientists, including Loeb, are awaiting new imagery and data to learn more about this interstellar object and determine what exactly it is.
Time if of the essence: the object is approaching Earth and will be at its closest point to the planet in just over a month from now on December 19, 2025.
