Avi Loeb: Why the 3I/ATLAS Plume Looks So Strange || Newly-Discovered Sideways Lines Are Likely a Satellite Streak or Otherwise a Hint for the Release of Smaller Objects by 3I/ATLAS

• Orientation of the Plume Around 3I/ATLAS in the HiRISE Image
  by https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
  The newly released HiRISE image of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS available here, shows an extension of the glowing plume in the direction of motion ahead of 3I/ATLAS. It appears like there is something preceding the object that was previously confused with being in the direction of the Sun but is actually in the direction of motion. In previous images like the Hubble Space Telescope image here, the two directions were similar when 3I/ATLAS was heading towards the Sun from far away.
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  It is easy to explain a plume of gas and dust extended towards the Sun as a result of the illumination of pockets of ice by sunlight or away from the Sun as a result of radiation pressure or the solar wind. It is also possible to explain a trailing stream that the object leaves behind as the drag on the solar wind slows it down relative to the object. But it is much more difficult to account for a plume extended perpendicular to the direction of the Sun and ahead of the object. The scale of the extension in the HiRISE image is ~3,000 km. At the typical thermal speed of volatiles which sublimate from the surface of a natural comet, it takes only a day to cross that distance.Could this be a technological signature of illuminating or clearing the path from any hazardous micrometeorites that may cause damage to a technological object?
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  For now, we can only hope that the mysteries of 3I/ATLAS will be cleared by data in the next few weeks when large ground-based telescopes as well as the Hubble and Webb telescopes will be able to characterize the jets of 3I/ATLAS by measuring their composition, speed and mass loading rate. These details will inform us without a doubt whether the jets are produced by natural pockets of ice that are warmed by sunlight or by technological thrusters. Upcoming data can be used to search for any additional objects that came out of 3I/ATLAS, be it fragments of ice for a natural object or mini-probes for a technological object.
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• Newly-Discovered Sideways Lines Are Likely a Satellite Streak or Otherwise a Hint for the Release of Smaller Objects by 3I/ATLAS
  by https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
  Today a new image of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS was taken by M. Jäger, G. Rhemann, and E. Prosperi and reported here. The image stacks 20 exposures of 100 seconds each, observed at 4:15 UTC on November 20, 2025. The displayed field has dimensions of 16.7 arcminutes on a side, equivalent to 1.6 million kilometers at the 3I/ATLAS distance of 326 million kilometers from Earth. The image shows two narrow jets directed opposite to each other and oriented vertically from the 3I/ATLAS-Sun axis. Together with the tail and anti-tail along this axis, the sideways lines constitute an X-shaped pattern. They extend out to a distance of about a million kilometers from 3I/ATLAS.
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  The simplest interpretation is that these lines are the streak of an Earth-based communication satellite which coincidentally intersected 3I/ATLAS in projection in the sky for a few seconds. There is another line near the bottom of the image, also likely to be a satellite streak. If future images will confirm the reality of these lines as associated with 3I/ATLAS, then these sideways jets will raise two questions:
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  1. Why are the sideways jets so straight and narrow, resembling thin lines, given that 3I/ATLAS was reported here to rotate with a 16.16-hour period? Given the typical thermal speed of 400 meters per second for sublimated volatiles at the current distance of 3I/ATLAS from the Sun, the rotation of 3I/ATLAS should have introduced gaps or wiggles in the jets on a length-scale of order tens of thousands of kilometers. Such periodic features are not apparent in the new image.
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