Epic times.
I'm excited.
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
December 11, 2025
Galaxies in the River
Large galaxies grow by eating small ones. Even our own galaxy engages in a sort of galactic cannibalism, absorbing small galaxies that are too close and are captured by the Milky Way's gravity. In fact, the practice is common in the universe and illustrated by this striking pair of interacting galaxies from the banks of the southern constellation Eridanus, The River. Located over 50 million light years away, the large, distorted spiral NGC 1532 is seen locked in a gravitational struggle with dwarf galaxy NGC 1531, a struggle the smaller galaxy will eventually lose. Seen nearly edge-on, in this sharp image spiral NGC 1532 spans about 100,000 light-years. The NGC 1532/1531 pair is thought to be similar to the well-studied system of face-on spiral and small companion known as M51.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
G2 Solar Storm, Solar Quakes, Ocean Shutdown | S0 News and frens
Dec.11.2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laf9wj0Kgzw
https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/FutureEO/Swarm/Swarm_detects_rare_proton_spike_during_solar_storm
https://newsarenaindia.com/technology/airbus-flight-recall-brings-solar-flare-theory-in-focus/64593
https://prm.ua/en/a-red-level-magnetic-storm-has-covered-the-planet-how-to-protect-yourself/
https://www.space.com/live/aurora-forecast-will-the-northern-lights-be-visible-tonight
https://x.com/StefanBurnsGeo/status/1998895560628240771
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfcfBlJ4Koo
https://x.com/MrMBB333/status/1998895391245480198
https://spaceweathernews.com/
https://www.spaceweather.com/
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/q-a-before-closest-approach-of-3i-atlas-to-earth-6ed6e2917b0f
https://medium.com/@davidsereda/the-core-of-3-i-atlas-reveals-the-architect-of-the-great-pyramid-a3ba4c52fa56
https://x.com/NRivelato/status/1999079684064284734
https://x.com/forallcurious/status/1998496915336606213
https://x.com/YueRaelian/status/1999079873273643077
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lowell-astronomers-shed-light-on-third-known-interstellar-object-comet-3iatlas-302639349.html
https://www.insightsonindia.com/2025/12/11/planetary-defense-exercise-3i-atlas/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpdvaqVk_B4 (Dobsonian Power: 3I/ATLAS JETS LOOK LIKE THRUSTERS!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyRIel_1MQw (The Hannibal TV: Avi Loeb Podcast on Trump Disclosure, 3i Atlas, Musk, Abductions & More!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM_fH8lV1qw (Chuck's Astrophotgraphy: Live: 3I/ATLAS and Two Galaxies (NGC 185 and NGC 147))
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9FzoS_Ee8M (John Michael Godier: Interstellar Comet 3i/ATLAS Update for December 10, 2025)
Q&A Before Closest Approach of 3I/ATLAS to Earth
December 11, 2025
Below is a Q&A list that combines questions from various reporters about the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, a week before its closest approach to Earth:
Q: How can a space probe hypothetically resemble a comet? Break it down for us like a 5th grader.
A: A comet is identified as an object that sheds dust and gas as a result of the illumination of pockets of ice on its surface by sunlight.
While shedding mass in a preferred direction, it recoils in the opposite direction similarly to a rocket. This gives rise to a non-gravitational acceleration.
A spacecraft could also collect ice and dust on its surface as a result of its motion through dense gas clouds in interstellar space. In addition, it could gain a non-gravitational acceleration as a result of a propulsion system.
Given these features, it may resemble a comet in unresolved images like the ones we have of 3I/ATLAS. However, a spacecraft could also display artificial lights, release excess heat from its engine or maneuver in unusual ways.
Q: Why are some scientists pushing back against any discussion on the conjecture that the anomalies of an interstellar object might be technological signatures?
A: The foundation of science is based on the humility to learn, not the arrogance of expertise.
When comet experts argued that the interstellar object 3I/ ATLAS must be a familiar water-rich comet as soon as it was discovered in July, they behaved like artificial intelligence systems: only able to reflect the data sets they were trained on.
For decades, the data set that established comet expertise largely comprised icy rocks in the solar system. My counterpoint is simple: humanity launched technological objects into space, so we must conclude that alien life forms could do the same.
This possibility must be added to the training data set of comet experts when studying interstellar objects.
To illustrate why, consider the following: on 2 January 2025, the Minor Planet Center — officiated by the International Astronomical Union to catalogue space objects — identified a ‘near-Earth asteroid’.
A day later, the officials realized that this ‘asteroid’ was following the same trajectory of the Tesla Roadster launched by Elon Musk’s SpaceX in 2018. They immediately removed the object from their asteroid catalogue, realizing that it was not in fact a rock but a car.
Musk, statistically, is not the most accomplished space entrepreneur in the Milky Way over the past 13.8 billion years. There are about a hundred billion stars with similar properties to the Sun in the Milky Way; roughly a tenth of them host a habitable Earth-size planet.
If you roll the dice on billions of Earth-sun analogues, surely you would — or at least could — find other space entrepreneurs on some exoplanets? There is no reason why 3I/ATLAS is not a ship launched from one of them.
Most stars are billions of years older than the Sun. Our Voyager spacecraft, with its 1970s technology, can reach the opposite side of the galaxy over the course of a billion years.
This implies that there has been plenty of time for interstellar artefacts, potentially more advanced than Voyager or the Tesla Roadster, to reach our solar system from interstellar space.
But would comet experts recognize these visitors as technological artefacts if their training data set includes only icy rocks? I do not believe so.
Q: Can you summarize the main anomalies of 3I/ATLAS?
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Let’s look at the evidence. I have identified the following main anomalies of 3I/ATLAS:
Its trajectory opposite to the direction of motion of the planets is aligned to within five degrees with the ecliptic plane of the planets around the Sun, with a likelihood of 0.2 percent. This suggests that it may have been designed to do this.
It arrived from a direction coincident with the enigmatic “Wow! Signal” to within 9 degrees. The chance of that happening at random is 0.6 percent.
Before and after perihelion, it displayed a sunward jet (anti- tail) that is not an optical illusion from geometric perspective, unlike familiar comets. This might be a technological signature.
Its arrival time was fine-tuned to bring it within tens of millions of kilometers from Mars, Venus and Jupiter and be unobservable from Earth at perihelion (when an object is closest to the Sun), with a likelihood of 0.005 percent.
The forecasted perijove distance of 3I/ATLAS during its encounter with Jupiter on March 16, 2026 is 53.6 million kilometers, nearly identical to Jupiter’s Hill radius, 53.5 million kilometers.
This rare coincidence might mean that 3I/ATLAS intends to release technological devices as artificial satellites of Jupiter, potentially at Jupiter’s Lagrange points — where orbital corrections and fuel requirements are minimal.
The nucleus of 3I/ATLAS is several orders of magnitude times more massive than 1I/`Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov, while moving faster than both.
There is not enough rocky material in interstellar space to deliver a rock of this mass once per decade to the inner solar system.
This suggests that 3I/ATLAS may have targeted the inner solar system rather than was drawn at random from the reservoir of interstellar rocks.
Its gas plume contains much more nickel than iron (as found in industrially produced nickel alloys) and a nickel to cyanide ratio that is orders of magnitude larger than that of all known comets, with a likelihood below 1 percent.
This may be a signature of industrial production of its surface material.
It exhibits jets in the direction of the sun and opposite to it, which requires an unreasonably large surface area in order to absorb enough sunlight to sublimate enough ice to feed the mass flux of these jets. Perhaps the jets originate from technological thrusters.
Near perihelion it exhibited non-gravitational acceleration. Perhaps this acceleration was produced by an engine. Its tightly collimated jets maintain orientation across a million kilometers in multiple directions relative to the sun.
This might imply that they are used for navigation or associated with the release of mini probes from a mothership.
Q: Why should science consider the technological origin of interstellar objects?
A: If 3I/ATLAS is technological, it could pose a threat to humanity.
We do not have a response protocol for alien technology, but after the first encounter — as long as we survive it — there will be political will to invest trillions of dollars in a warning system of interceptors that take close-up photos of anomalous interstellar objects.
3I/ATLAS is expected to arrive closest to Earth in a week, on December 19, 2025. Let us hope that we will not get unwanted gifts for the holidays.
In ignoring these anomalies, comet experts miss two important opportunities.
First, science needs to be viewed as a continuous process rather than as a finished product. Collecting evidence is a learning experience akin to the work of a detective.
It sometimes unravels a sobering truth that was not anticipated, since nature is more imaginative than we are. This was certainly the case when quantum mechanics was discovered a century ago and revealed a physical reality that was counterintuitive to Albert Einstein’s findings.
Despite lessons from history, present-day scientists minimize the risk to their reputation by not sharing error-corrections from data and conversing with the public only once they know the final answer.
In this risk-averse intellectual climate, they inform the public of their final findings in press conferences, where they behave like lecturers in the classroom.
The audience is made aware of what it needs to know. By minimizing the risk to their reputation, scientists promote the impression that science is an occupation of the intellectual elite.
The truth is that the mainstream of science is routinely wrong. Albert Einstein argued between 1935 and 1940 that black holes or gravitational waves do not exist.
The popular idea of supersymmetry was ruled out by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. In addition, after four decades of occupying center stage in mainstream theoretical physics, string theory is no closer to making unique predictions that can be tested experimentally.
Science is a work in progress. Anomalies offer a multitude of interpretations that are tested by new data that can rule out all but one of them.
2/3
Second, the mainstream defined the search for microbes as the highest priority in the 2020 U.S. Decadal Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics, converging on the allocation of more than 10 billion dollars to the Habitable World Observatory and sidelining the search for technological signatures.
Even if microbes are far more abundant on exoplanets, it might be easier to identify technological signatures. It therefore makes most sense to hedge our bets and invest billions of dollars in the simultaneous search for both technological and primitive life forms.
The public is much more passionate about the search for aliens than the search for microbes. Taxpayers fund science and scientists should not sideline the public’s interest when defining research priorities.
I receive hundreds of emails from fans every day and many parents write that their children wish to become scientists after seeing me speak in podcasts or on television.
Q: You dubbed the perihelion of 3I/ATLAS as a probable ‘black swan’ event. What are your thoughts on its closest flyby to Earth?
A: 3I/ATLAS will pass closest to Earth on December 19, 2025. Fortunately, this date coincides with a new moon when the view of the sky will not be contaminated by moonlight, making it an ideal observing night for Earth-based telescopes.
My hope is that we will gain new insights into the nature of 3I/ATLAS at that time thanks to data from hundreds of observatories, including the Hubble and Webb space telescopes.
In particular, spectrographs on large telescopes can measure the speed and composition of the outflowing material in the jets of 3I/ATLAS.
If these jets originate from pockets of ice on the surface of a rock, then their thermal speed would be smaller than a few hundreds of meters per second. This speed is much smaller than expected from technological thrusters.
Q: Can we possibly deduce a connection between the surge in solar flares and 3I/ATLAS? Would that be speculative sci-fi.
A: It is unlikely that the surge in solar flares is connected to 3I/ATLAS. However, our imagination is mostly limited by the technologies we possess.
Q: What is the best evidence so far that suggests we are probably not alone in the universe?
A: It is arrogant to believe that we are alone in the Milky-Way because it contains 100 billion stars. Since we emerged from a soup of chemicals which is common on habitable Earth-mass planets, common sense suggests that the galaxy is teaming with life.
Q: What is the current status of the study on the interstellar meteor IM1?
A: We are currently analyzing the chemical and isotopic composition of the materials collected from the fireball site of the interstellar meteor IM1, and have preliminary evidence for a composition that originated outside the solar system.
More details about our results will be made public in spring 2026.
Q: Are you into comics? If so, which ones are your favorite heroes/villains, etc.?
A: No, I am not.
Q: And why?
A: I do not have time for that. I focus on studying physical reality with the best scientific tools that I have access to.
Q: Have you watched Stranger Things? or similar supernatural / sci-fi series? Your remarks.
A: No, I enjoy science fact, not science fiction.
Q: Growing up, what fascinated you to pick up astronomy?
A: It was forced upon me by circumstances. In 1988 I was offered a 5-year fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton — where Albert Einstein was faculty three decades earlier, under the condition that I will work on astrophysics.
Q: Why is the new frontier of interstellar objects exciting?
A: Remarkably, interstellar objects offer a new opportunity for both the search for primitive and technological lifeforms. We can land on an interstellar rock and return a sample of it to Earth. The returned sample may reveal the building blocks of life from another star.
But if the interstellar object happens to be a technological artefact, our learning opportunities would be far greater. The fundamental question after landing on a spacecraft with buttons on its surface would be whether to press any of them.
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other comets and stuff
Comet C/2025 K1 ATLAS fragmentation: a new image – 9 Dec. 2025
12/10/2025
We imaged comet C/2025 K1 ATLAS and its fragments again under good sky conditions, as part of our follow-up program on this object.
The image above comes from the sigma-clipping combination of 19, 60-second unfiltered exposures, remotely taken with the Celestron C14+Paramount ME+SBIG ST-10XME robotic unit available as part of the Virtual Telescope Project in Manciano, Italy. Sky conditions were very good.
Our image shows something very similar to what was seen on 6 Dec. via the Gemini North 8.1-meter telescope.
We spotted two fainter, leading fragments on the West and a bright, trailing one on the East, with what looks like a cloud of debris between them.
While C/2025 K1 ATLAS is significantly fading, it remain a truly intriguing target.
We will continue monitoring this comet.
https://www.virtualtelescope.eu/2025/12/10/comet-c-2025-k1-atlas-fragmentation-a-new-image-9-dec-2025/
Comet 240P/NEAT fragments: two images – 19 Nov. & 9 Dec. 2025
12/10/2025
We imaged comet 240P/NEAT on its way to perihelion, capturing both its fragments on two different nights.
The image above comes from the sigma-clipping combination of 7, 300-second unfiltered exposures, remotely taken with the Celestron C14+Paramount ME+SBIG ST-10XME robotic unit available as part of the Virtual Telescope Project in Manciano, Italy. Sky conditions were very good.
Both fragments A (the brightest component on the left) and B are well visible, together with the dusty tail.
About twenty days earlier we captured another, lower resolution image, showing both the fragments.
This comet will reach perihelion next 19 Dec. and we will continue monitoring it through the season..
https://www.virtualtelescope.eu/2025/12/10/comet-240p-neat-fragments-two-images-19-nov-9-dec-2025/
https://x.com/konstructivizm/status/1998960431218700501
https://www.hpenews.com/news/national/astrophotographers-capture-night-sky-full-of-satellites-as-comet-passes-earth/article_61b3d930-bf43-53e7-9c30-b60767072734.html
https://www.stgeorgeutah.com/news/look-up-geminids-meteor-shower-to-peak-over-southern-utah-with-interstellar-comet-and-ursids/article_881cdc3b-ca42-4cca-b0b3-ad700747d3af.html
NASA Loses Contact With MAVEN Mars Orbiter After 11-Year Mission: "Loss Of Signal"
Dec 11, 2025 16:27 pm IST
NASA has lost contact with MAVEN, a spacecraft that has been studying Mars since 2014.
The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) probe went silent on December 6, 2025, as it passed behind Mars - a routine part of its orbit.
While the spacecraft was operating normally before the event, NASA was unable to reestablish communication once it reemerged from behind the planet.
The sudden loss of contact has prompted concern among mission scientists. On December 9, NASA confirmed it is actively investigating the issue and working to regain a signal from the probe.
"NASA's MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) spacecraft, in orbit around Mars, experienced a loss of signal with ground stations on Earth on Dec. 6.
Telemetry from MAVEN had showed all subsystems working normally before it orbited behind the Red Planet. After the spacecraft emerged from behind Mars, NASA's Deep Space Network did not observe a signal," NASA said in a statement.
"The spacecraft and operations teams are investigating the anomaly to address the situation. More information will be shared once it becomes available," NASA added.
MAVEN spacecraft
Maven, launched in 2013, entered Mars' orbit in September 2014 to study the upper atmosphere and its interaction with the solar wind.
The mission revealed that the sun's influence led to Mars losing its atmosphere over time, transforming the planet from a warm, wet world to the cold, dry environment we see today.
MAVEN has played a crucial dual role, not only studying Mars's upper atmosphere but also serving as a communication relay for NASA's rovers, Curiosity and Perseverance. Its scientific contributions have been significant in shaping our understanding of the Red Planet.
MAVEN's data was key in uncovering how Mars lost much of its water, showing that during intense dust storms, water can be lifted high into the atmosphere and then stripped away by solar wind.
The spacecraft also helped map global wind patterns, discovered Mars's invisible magnetic "tail," and identified a process called "sputtering" that accelerates the loss of atmospheric gases.
It even detected a rare form of proton aurora, previously unseen on Mars.
These insights have deepened our understanding of planetary evolution, showing how Earth and Mars, diverged dramatically in terms of climate and habitability.
MAVEN's findings are also valuable for guiding future missions to Mars.
2 other spacecrafts orbiting Mars
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and Mars Odyssey are still operational, providing valuable data and serving as communication relays for Mars missions.
MRO, launched in 2005, has been studying the Martian surface and atmosphere, while Mars Odyssey, launched in 2001, is the longest-running spacecraft at Mars, focusing on geological and climate research.
The Mars Odyssey's mission is to study "clouds, fog and frost, and mapping surface rocks to make future Mars landings safer," according to NASA.
https://www.ndtv.com/science/nasa-loses-contact-with-maven-mars-orbiter-after-11-year-mission-loss-of-signal-9791600
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-15373847/NASA-loses-contact-spacecraft-Mars.html
https://x.com/NASAWatch/status/1998569640063107148
https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/maven/2025/12/09/nasa-teams-work-maven-spacecraft-signal-loss/