Avi Loeb

However, you might find a package in your mailbox or a tennis ball thrown by a neighbor in your backyard, okay?

And that's a completely different approach because that tennis ball or that package will stay there.

All of these interstellar objects that we studied so far are bound by gravity to the Milky Way.

They don't leave the Milky Way.

They keep accumulating over time.

You think of it as space trash, or if they're functional, they might actually visit the inner parts.

That was my point, that 3I Atlas could have decided to visit the inner solar system because it was moving within five degrees of the planet's

orbital plane around the sun.

I wanted to ask you about that.

Why is that so strange to come in with the plane of the ecliptic?

Oh, because the chance for that happening at random is one in 500.

And this is the third interstellar object that we found, only the third one.

So you would expect to find hundreds of objects coming at arbitrary angles.

just like Oumuamua did, just like Borisov, the second one.

However, this one was the third one and it came right in the plane with a probability of less than a percent.

So then the question is why?

And one possible reason is to spend a lot of time

close to planets and get some information about the solar system.

That makes sense.

Now, this also is an opportunity for us because we have a lot of space assets that can be used to monitor 3I Atlas.