Avi Loeb

It's pointing towards the sun.

It's not pointing away from the sun.

Usually cometary tails are made of dust and gas, which is pushed back away from the sun by the radiation and the solar wind.

And so this one was pointed towards the sun, not away from the sun.

And the question is why?

And actually I calculated that it appeared very clearly in the sharpest image we had from the Hubble Space Telescope,

which showed an elongation by a factor of two towards the sun.

But we were looking at it like a cigar.

We were looking almost along the cigar long axis, within 10 degrees of the object's sun axis.

So we were looking almost edge on.

And I calculated if you were to correct for that, this would be a feature that is 10 times longer than it is wide.

And that means it's like a jet.

So the object had a jet in front of it towards the sun.

The question is why?

And the comet experts ignored it and just said, well, comets are strange.

Who knows?

But my point is, this is a blind date of interstellar proportions.

And my advice on blind dates is not to...

speak or say what you think this is, but to observe the other side.

The best way to respond to a blind date is to observe the other side.