"Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb is no stranger to furthering eyebrow-raising ideas. Lately, for instance, he's been hypothesizing that the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS - broadly believed by his peers to be a comet - is an artifact sent to us by an alien civilization. He has even suggested that the rare visitor may be behind the "Wow! Signal," an unusual radio emission that has puzzled scientists since its detection in 1977."
"The twist? The civilization in question would be the Soviet Union. Specifically, the researcher suggests that 2025 PN7, a so-called " second moon" that was first discovered to have been temporarily captured by the Earth's gravitational pull in August, could be the remnants of the USSR's Zond 1 mission, which launched in April 1964 - a tantalizing theory that isn't as far-fetched as it sounds."
"With the help of Loeb's colleague Adam Hibberd, a software engineer for the nonprofit Initiative for Interstellar Studies, Loeb attempted to retrace the Zond 1 mission's interplanetary trajectory and compared it to 2025 PN7's. Their running theory: Zond 1 struggled to boost itself sufficiently to make it to Venus, circling the Sun in a long-lost orbit - only to have been found again as what astronomers are now calling quasi-satellite 2025 PN7."
An interstellar object, 3I/ATLAS, is broadly classified as a comet but alternative hypotheses propose an artificial origin possibly linked to the 1977 "Wow! Signal." A newly-identified quasi-satellite, 2025 PN7, follows an Earth-like orbit and was temporarily captured by Earth's gravity in August. One hypothesis identifies 2025 PN7 as remnants of the USSR's Zond 1 probe or its upper rocket stage after a failed Venus trajectory and loss of contact in 1964. Trajectory retracing compared Zond 1's mission path with 2025 PN7's current orbit. A spectral measurement of 2025 PN7 could reveal surface composition and test the remnants hypothesis.
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