UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

An interstellar comet is as its name suggests, a comet that originated outside our Solar System and travels through interstellar space before entering our neighbourhood. Unlike comets that orbit the Sun and formed within our Solar System, these rare visitors come from other star systems, traveling for millions or even billions of years across interstellar space. When they pass through our Solar System, their trajectories are hyperbolic rather than elliptical, meaning they're just passing through rather than remaining bound by the Sun's gravity. The most famous example is 2I/Borisov, discovered in 2019, which became the first confirmed interstellar comet observed.

Interstellar comet 2I/Borisov captured by the Hubble Space Telescope

(Credit : NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt (UCLA))

Until now, water has never been detected from an interstellar comet but a team from Auburn University did just that. In comets native to our Solar System, water serves as the primary way to measure the comet’s activity. Water loss is tracked to understand how sunlight drives the release of other volatile gases locked within a comet's icy nucleus. Finding the same chemical signature in an interstellar visitor means astronomers can finally begin comparing 3I/ATLAS directly with Solar System comets, offering the first opportunity to compare the chemistry of planetary systems across the Galaxy.

What makes this detection particularly intriguing is the distance at which it occurred. Swift's observations captured hydroxyl emissions when 3I/ATLAS was nearly three times farther from the Sun than Earth, well beyond the region where surface ice typically turns straight to a gas easily. At that distance, the comet was losing water at roughly 40 kilograms per second, that’s the kind of output from a fire hose! Most Solar System comets remain dormant at such distances, suggesting something unusual is happening with ATLAS.

The location of the ATLAS system of telescopes that scours the skies for potential impactors

(Credit : Strebe)

The strong ultraviolet signal that the team detected hints at a complex process where sunlight heats small icy grains released from the nucleus, allowing them to vaporise and contribute to the surrounding gas cloud. These extended water sources have been observed in only a handful of distant comets and point toward layered ices that preserve clues about how these objects originally formed in their parent star system.

Each interstellar comet discovered so far has revealed dramatically different chemistry. 'Oumuamua, the first interstellar visitor identified in 2017, appeared remarkably dry, lacking any appreciable water content. The second, 2I/Borisov, proved rich in carbon monoxide. Now 3I/ATLAS is releasing water at unexpected distances. These differences demonstrate how varied the building blocks of planetary systems can be, driven by factors like temperature, radiation exposure, and local composition during formation.

To make their discovery, the team used NASA's Swift Observatory which carries a modest 30 centimetre telescope, but its location above Earth's atmosphere allows it to detect ultraviolet wavelengths that are almost completely absorbed before reaching ground based observatories. Free from atmospheric interference, Swift achieves sensitivity comparable to a four metre ground telescope at these wavelengths. Thankfully the team captured the data before 3I/ATLAS disappeared from view but it will become observable again after mid November, offering another opportunity to track how its activity evolves as it moves closer to the Sun.

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Physicists uncork a message in a bottle from another star

Centuries before the Roswell UFO Incident, Native Americans had their own stories to tell about alien visitations — for example, about the “Sky People” who traveled from the Pleiades star cluster to Earth and have a special bond with the Cherokee Nation.

In a newly published novel titled “Hole in the Sky,” Cherokee science-fiction author Daniel H. Wilson blends those stories with up-to-date speculation about UFOs, now also known as unidentified anomalous phenomena or UAPs, to deliver a fresh take on the classic tale of first contact with an alien civilization.

Wilson says the typical alien-invasion tale tends to parallel the real-life story of European settlement in the Americas. “I love robot uprisings and alien invasions, and the more I thought about it, you realize that in an alien invasion, the aliens show up, and they usually want to extract our resources, take our land, our water, destroy our culture, enslave us,” he says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “That’s kind of a really thinly veiled fear projection that what colonizers have done to Indigenous people will be done to our society. And so I started from there.”

He also managed to weave in other elements of Cherokee mythology, such as a supernatural being known as Tsul ‘Kalu or Judaculla. In tribal lore, the Judaculla is a giant with slanted eyes — something like the legendary Bigfoot or Sasquatch. The Judaculla plays a brief but pivotal role in “Hole in the Sky.”

“If you think about the human embodiment of Indigenous technology, it would be the Judaculla,” Wilson says, “because among the Cherokee at that time, the most advanced technological problems would have been keeping the ecosystem in balance to support all the people in perpetuity, without overexploiting it and doing what we’ve been doing for the last 200 years or more in North America.”

In Wilson’s novel, there’s a good deal of Cherokee-style magic at work, centered on Spiro Mounds, a complex of earthworks that was built centuries ago in eastern Oklahoma. But there are also lots of references to the U.S. military’s renewed interest in UFOs/UAPs. That part of the story draws upon a different phase in Wilson’s life.

“I had been writing threat assessments for the Air Force, which is where they find science-fiction authors, and they pair you with an analyst,” he says. “They brief you on some kind of potentially dangerous tech or interesting technology. And then you write a story, something fun that’s fictional, that demonstrates these sorts of threat capabilities. Higher-up people read these fictional accounts in order to get a better idea of what the threat could be.”

Wilson was amazed to learn that military officials have serious concerns about unidentified aerial phenomena.

“Nobody’s saying they’re aliens, but we don’t know what they are, and we’re intensely interested in learning more because it is a major defense issue for our country,” he says. “Walking away from that, I was thinking, ‘My God … This sounds crazy, but we could be in a situation in our lifetimes where first contact will be a real thing.'”

What would we do if the aliens arrived? Wilson imagines the actions that might be taken by intelligence experts, military leaders, scientists and regular folks — including a Cherokee oilfield worker and his daughter — and weaves them into a deliciously tangled tale.

“Hole in the Sky” is the latest science-fiction novel by Daniel H. Wilson. (Cover Design by Oliver Munday;

Photo © Brenton Salo / Published by Doubleday Penguin Random House)

A couple of the plot twists in “Hole in the Sky” capitalize on far-out aspects of space science, such as the real-world odysseys of NASA’s Voyager spacecraft beyond our solar system’s heliopause — that is, beyond the boundary where the outward-flowing solar wind is stopped by the faint pressure of the surrounding interstellar medium.

“If you think of our sun as a fire in the infinite night, this is where the light of the fire dies out, and you get out there into the real nitty-gritty between stars,” Wilson says. “And I thought, what better place to wake up something in the night than whenever you set foot outside the light of our own fire.”

Wilson drew upon recent observations of interstellar objects to describe how the aliens make their arrival. “We’ve gained this capability to observe interstellar objects, and they just keep getting more interesting, and frankly, more scary and creepy,” he says.

Turning real-life science into science fiction is nothing new for Wilson. Before he became a novelist, he was a robotics researcher with a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University. That expertise came in handy when he sat down to write books like “How to Survive a Robot Uprising,” “How to Build a Robot Army,” “Robopocalypse” and “Robogenesis.”

“This is what I do with my writing,” he says. “I mean, I was a scientist.”

A film adaptation of “Robopocalypse” has been in the works for 15 years. “I still hold out hope that we’ll see a ‘Robopocalypse’ movie someday, but I’m not holding my breath,” Wilson says. In contrast, there’s a chance that “Hole in the Sky” will be coming to a screen near you. Wilson says he’s adapting the story for Netflix.

“We have Sterlin Harjo attached to direct,” he says. “If you haven’t seen ‘The Lowdown,’ which is a TV show he just made with Ethan Hawke, you gotta watch it, it’s incredible. He of course did ‘Reservation Dogs’ before that. Sterlin is an incredible Native director and writer, and working with him on that has been really fun.”

Check out the original version of this item at Cosmic Log to get Daniel H. Wilson's reading recommendations for fans of science fiction and horror with a Native American twist.

Wilson is in the midst of a nationwide book tour that includes stops in Seattle and in several Oregon cities. I’ll be the moderator for the Oct. 16 event at the Seattle Public Library, featuring a conversation between Wilson and Seattle science-fiction author Nisi Shawl. The event is being presented by the library in partnership with Clarion West and Third Place Books. It’s free to attend in person, or to watch via streaming video, but registration is required.

My co-host for the Fiction Science podcast is Dominica Phetteplace, an award-winning writer who is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and lives in San Francisco. To learn more about Phetteplace, visit DominicaPhetteplace.com.

Fiction Science is included in FeedSpot’s 100 Best Sci-Fi Podcasts. Stay tuned for future episodes of the Fiction Science podcast via Apple, Spotify, Player.fm, Pocket Casts and Podchaser. If you like Fiction Science, please rate the podcast and subscribe to get alerts for future episodes.