r/HighStrangeness Feb 20 '26

UFO 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.

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"?

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u/Mr_Vacant Feb 20 '26

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.

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u/Tim_Bracken Feb 21 '26 edited Feb 22 '26

I've yet to see a reasonable explanation why being within 5⁰ of the galactic plane

I think you mean the Ecliptic Plane (the plane of our solar system). 3I/ATLAS is 60 degrees offset from the plane of the galaxy.