For more than two years, astronomers have been puzzled by a mysterious discovery from the ancient universe - hundreds of objects known as "little red dots" so far away the light had to travel billions of years to become visible to scientists. First detected by the James Webb Space Telescope, these unusually compact vestiges from the cosmic dawn have sparked intense debate: Are they densely packed galaxies? Or do they contain massive black holes?
To back up his far-fetched theory, Loeb has pointed out that 3I/ATLAS' highly unusual trajectory brings it suspiciously close to Jupiter, Mars, and Venus. In a new blog post, the astronomer pointed out that the object will come within just 1.67 million miles of Mars' path around the Sun, in what he characterized as a "remarkable fine-tuning" of the object's path.