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Before anyone thinks this is anything weird:
"SPHEREx’s finding very large amounts of vaporized carbon dioxide gas around 3I/ATLAS told us it could be like a normal solar system comet," Johns Hopkins University astronomer Carey Lisse, a member of the SPHEREx science team, told Space.com.
It's normal. Still cool and worth studying but, once again, it isn't aliens.
The curiosity value of this one is that scientists haven't seen many comets from outside the solar system. So even if it's not that different from the usual home-grown comets, that's an interesting discovery.
For sure. Just wanted to get ahead of the alien claims that always come.
One thing I found quite disturbing this week: I watched a factual YouTube video about this comet and what was being discovered about it, then I looked at the comments. There were many hundreds of comments and every single one was claiming the video was a cover-up for aliens. Many of them accused NASA of being a corrupt institution hiding the truth about aliens and called for the destruction of NASA. There was not a single comment on the science or even accepting that this was a comet. It was basically an angry mob calling for attacks on scientists for covering up "the truth". The amount of ignorant fury in the comments was shocking.
I know YouTube comments are hardly representative of the population as a whole, but not to find even one comment that wasn't angry and paranoid was worrying.
Yeah, to so many people just about anything is evidence for some conspiracy, and the lack of evidence is even more evidence. It's so frustrating.
But if you were an alien, wouldn't you hide in carbon dioxide?
Cool and all, but isn’t that pretty standard for a comet?