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Is this an Interstellar Alien Mothership passing the Sun
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By NASA
4 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
On Sept. 9, 2025, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this image of the Sun.NASA/GSFC/Solar Dynamics Observatory It looked like the Sun was heading toward a historic lull in activity. That trend flipped in 2008, according to new research.
The Sun has become increasingly active since 2008, a new NASA study shows. Solar activity is known to fluctuate in cycles of 11 years, but there are longer-term variations that can last decades. Case in point: Since the 1980s, the amount of solar activity had been steadily decreasing all the way up to 2008, when solar activity was the weakest on record. At that point, scientists expected the Sun to be entering a period of historically low activity.
But then the Sun reversed course and started to become increasingly active, as documented in the study, which appears in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. It’s a trend that researchers said could lead to an uptick in space weather events, such as solar storms, flares, and coronal mass ejections.
“All signs were pointing to the Sun going into a prolonged phase of low activity,” said Jamie Jasinski of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, lead author of the new study. “So it was a surprise to see that trend reversed. The Sun is slowly waking up.”
The earliest recorded tracking of solar activity began in the early 1600s, when astronomers, including Galileo, counted sunspots and documented their changes. Sunspots are cooler, darker regions on the Sun’s surface that are produced by a concentration of magnetic field lines. Areas with sunspots are often associated with higher solar activity, such as solar flares, which are intense bursts of radiation, and coronal mass ejections, which are huge bubbles of plasma that erupt from the Sun’s surface and streak across the solar system.
NASA scientists track these space weather events because they can affect spacecraft, astronauts’ safety, radio communications, GPS, and even power grids on Earth. Space weather predictions are critical for supporting the spacecraft and astronauts of NASA’s Artemis campaign, as understanding the space environment is a vital part of mitigating astronaut exposure to space radiation.
Launching no earlier than Sept. 23, NASA’s IMAP (Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe) and Carruthers Geocorona Observatory missions, as well as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s SWFO-L1 (Space Weather Follow On-Lagrange 1) mission, will provide new space weather research and observations that will help to drive future efforts at the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
Solar activity affects the magnetic fields of planets throughout the solar system. As the solar wind — a stream of charged particles flowing from the Sun — and other solar activity increase, the Sun’s influence expands and compresses magnetospheres, which serve as protective bubbles of planets with magnetic cores and magnetic fields, including Earth. These protective bubbles are important for shielding planets from the jets of plasma that stream out from the Sun in the solar wind.
Over the centuries that people have been studying solar activity, the quietest times were a three-decade stretch from 1645 to 1715 and a four-decade stretch from 1790 to 1830. “We don’t really know why the Sun went through a 40-year minimum starting in 1790,” Jasinski said. “The longer-term trends are a lot less predictable and are something we don’t completely understand yet.”
In the two-and-a-half decades leading up to 2008, sunspots and the solar wind decreased so much that researchers expected the “deep solar minimum” of 2008 to mark the start of a new historic low-activity time in the Sun’s recent history.
“But then the trend of declining solar wind ended, and since then plasma and magnetic field parameters have steadily been increasing,” said Jasinski, who led the analysis of heliospheric data publicly available in a platform called OMNIWeb Plus, run by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The data Jasinski and colleagues mined for the study came from a broad collection of NASA missions. Two primary sources — ACE (Advanced Composition Explorer) and the Wind mission — launched in the 1990s and have been providing data on solar activity like plasma and energetic particles flowing from the Sun toward Earth. The spacecraft belong to a fleet of NASA Heliophysics Division missions designed to study the Sun’s influence on space, Earth, and other planets.
News Media Contacts
Gretchen McCartney
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-287-4115
gretchen.p.mccartney@jpl.nasa.gov
Karen Fox / Abbey Interrante
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / abbey.a.interrante@nasa.gov
2025-118
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Last Updated Sep 15, 2025 Related Terms
Heliophysics Jet Propulsion Laboratory The Solar System Explore More
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By NASA
6 Min Read Upcoming Launch to Boost NASA’s Study of Sun’s Influence Across Space
Soon, there will be three new ways to study the Sun’s influence across the solar system with the launch of a trio of NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) spacecraft. Expected to launch no earlier than Tuesday, Sept. 23, the missions include NASA’s IMAP (Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe), NASA’s Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, and NOAA’s SWFO-L1 (Space Weather Follow On-Lagrange 1) spacecraft.
The three missions will launch together aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. From there, the spacecraft will travel together to their destination at the first Earth-Sun Lagrange point (L1), around one million miles from Earth toward the Sun.
The missions will each focus on different effects of the solar wind — the continuous stream of particles emitted by the Sun — and space weather — the changing conditions in space driven by the Sun — from their origins at the Sun to their farthest reaches billions of miles away at the edge of our solar system. Research and observations from the missions will help us better understand the Sun’s influence on Earth’s habitability, map our home in space, and protect satellites and voyaging astronauts and airline crews from space weather impacts.
The IMAP and Carruthers missions add to NASA’s heliophysics fleet of spacecraft. Together, NASA’s heliophysics missions study a vast, interconnected system from the Sun to the space surrounding Earth and other planets to the farthest limits of the Sun’s constantly flowing streams of solar wind. The SWFO-L1 mission, funded and operated by NOAA, will be the agency’s first satellite designed specifically for and fully dedicated to continuous, operational space weather observations.
Mapping our home in space: IMAP
The IMAP mission will study the heliosphere, our home in space.
NASA/Princeton University/Patrick McPike As a modern-day celestial cartographer, IMAP will investigate two of the most important overarching issues in heliophysics: the interaction of the solar wind at its boundary with interstellar space and the energization of charged particles from the Sun.
The IMAP mission will principally study the boundary of our heliosphere — a huge bubble created by the solar wind that encapsulates our solar system — and study how the heliosphere interacts with the local galactic neighborhood beyond. The heliosphere protects the solar system from dangerous high-energy particles called galactic cosmic rays. Mapping the heliosphere’s boundaries helps scientists understand our home in space and how it came to be habitable.
“IMAP will revolutionize our understanding of the outer heliosphere,” said David McComas, IMAP mission principal investigator at Princeton University in New Jersey. “It will give us a very fine picture of what’s going on out there by making measurements that are 30 times more sensitive and at higher resolution than ever before.”
The IMAP mission will also explore and chart the vast range of particles in interplanetary space. The spacecraft will provide near real-time observations of the solar wind and energetic particles, which can produce hazardous conditions not only in the space environment near Earth, but also on the ground. The mission’s data will help model and improve prediction capabilities of the impacts of space weather ranging from power-line disruptions to loss of satellites.
Imaging Earth’s exosphere: Carruthers Geocorona Observatory
An illustration shows the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory spacecraft. NASA/BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems The Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, a small satellite, will launch with IMAP as a rideshare. The mission was named after Dr. George Carruthers, creator of the Moon-based telescope that captured the first images of Earth’s exosphere, the outermost layer of our planet’s atmosphere.
The Carruthers mission will build upon Dr. Carruthers’ legacy by charting changes in Earth’s exosphere. The mission’s vantage point at L1 offers a complete view of the exosphere not visible from the Moon’s relatively close distance to Earth. From there, it will address fundamental questions about the nature of the region, such as its shape, size, density, and how it changes over time.
The exosphere plays an important role in Earth’s response to space weather, which can impact our technology, from satellites in orbit to communications signals in the upper atmosphere or power lines on the ground. During space weather storms, the exosphere mediates the energy absorption and release throughout the near-Earth space environment, influencing strength of space weather disturbances. Carruthers will help us better understand the fundamental physics of our exosphere and improve our ability to predict the impacts of the Sun’s activity.
“We’ll be able to create movies of how this atmospheric layer responds when a solar storm hits, and watch it change with the seasons over time,” said Lara Waldrop, the principal investigator for the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
New space weather station: SWFO-L1
SWFO-L1 will provide real-time observations of the Sun’s corona and solar wind to help forecast the resulting space weather.
NOAA/BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems Distinct from NASA’s research satellites, SWFO-L1 will be an operational satellite, designed to observe solar activity and the solar wind in real time to provide critical data in NOAA’s mission to protect the nation from environmental hazards. SWFO-L1 will serve as an early-warning beacon for potentially damaging space weather events that could impact our technology on Earth. SWFO-L1 will observe the Sun’s outer atmosphere for large eruptions, called coronal mass ejections, and measure the solar wind upstream from Earth with a state-of-the-art suite of instruments and processing system.
This mission is the first of a new generation of NOAA space weather observatories dedicated to 24/7 operations, working to avoid gaps in continuity.
“SWFO-L1 will be an amazing deep-space mission for NOAA,” said Dimitrios Vassiliadis, SWFO program scientist at NOAA. “Thanks to its advantageous location at L1, it will continuously monitor the solar atmosphere while measuring the solar wind and its interplanetary magnetic fields well before it impacts Earth — and transmit these data in record time.”
With SWFO-L1’s enhanced performance, unobstructed views, and minimal delay between observations and data return, NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center forecasters will give operators improved lead time required to take precautionary actions that protect vital infrastructure, economic interests, and national security on Earth and in space.
By Mara Johnson-Groh
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Sep 04, 2025 Related Terms
Carruthers Geocorona Observatory (GLIDE) Heliophysics Heliosphere IMAP (Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe) NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) Solar Wind Space Weather The Sun The Sun & Solar Physics Explore More
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By USH
Everything we know about 3I/ATLAS to date:
On July 1, 2025, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) station at Río Hurtado, Chile, detected something extraordinary: a fast-moving object flagged with the provisional designation A11pl3Z, later named 3I/ATLAS, also cataloged as C/2025 N1 (ATLAS).
At first glance, it was classified as a comet. But almost immediately, astronomers realized that this visitor was anything but ordinary.
3I/ATLAS imaged by the James Webb Space Telescope's NIRSpec on 6 August 2025.
Why 3I/ATLAS is different.
1. Interstellar Origins Like ʻOumuamua (1I/2017 U1) and Borisov (2I/2019 Q4) before it, 3I/ATLAS is only the third confirmed interstellar object to enter our solar system. Its steep hyperbolic orbit—with an eccentricity greater than 1.02—proves it is not gravitationally bound to the Sun.
2. A Composition Unlike Any Comet Most comets are rich in water ice. Not 3I/ATLAS. Spectroscopic analysis from both the Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) revealed it is dominated by carbon dioxide with one of the highest CO₂-to-water ratios ever measured. This makes it chemically alien compared to the comets that formed in our own solar system.
3. A Tail That Breaks the Rules Comets typically sprout tails pointing away from the Sun, driven by sublimating ice. 3I/ATLAS, however, displays a dust plume angled toward the Sun—a tail in the “wrong” direction. This phenomenon has never been observed in a natural comet and suggests either unusual physics or engineered behavior.
4. Perfectly Aligned Trajectory Instead of cutting randomly across the solar system, 3I/ATLAS travels almost exactly along the ecliptic plane, the flat orbital path where Earth, Mars, and most of the planets reside. Statistically, the odds of a random interstellar object aligning this precisely are less than 0.005%.
5. Unexplained Acceleration Data from radar tracking and JWST confirm subtle but persistent non-gravitational acceleration. Normally, such changes are explained by outgassing jets. Yet Webb detects no coma, no jets, no thermal signature to explain the push. Instead, the acceleration resembles controlled propulsion, similar to how an ion engine expels dust or gas for thrust.
6. Forward-Facing Glow: Instead of a tail behind it, 3I/ATLAS shines with a glow ahead of its motion, almost as if it were illuminating its path.
7. Stabilized Rotation: Unlike natural tumbling comets, it appears to maintain attitude control, consistent with artificial stabilization.
8. Speculations of nuclear propulsion: Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, already known for his bold ʻOumuamua interpretations, has highlighted its non-gravitational acceleration and trajectory. He even speculated that 3I/ATLAS might be nuclear-powered technology, perhaps venting dust as thrust.
9. 3I/ATLAS will not simply zip past and leave. Its calculated path takes it past several key planets: Venus flyby – August 2025 Mars encounter – September 2025 Jupiter flyby – late 2026
Tilted view of 3I/ATLAS's trajectory through the Solar System, with orbits and positions of planets shown. Such a sequence of planetary passes looks less like coincidence and more like a deliberate survey trajectory.
Finally, on October 30, 2025, the object will reach perihelion, its closest approach to the Sun. Crucially, at that moment it will be hidden directly behind the Sun from Earth’s perspective, a perfect opportunity for a stealth maneuver if it is indeed under intelligent control.
10. And the latest news on this object is that 3I/ATLAS shows signs of alien electroplating. Astronomers using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile have detected something never before seen in a natural comet, a plume of pure nickel gas, laced with cyanide, but completely lacking iron.
This is not how comets behave. In every known case, nickel and iron are paired together in space rocks, asteroids, and cosmic debris. The absence of iron in 3I/ATLAS makes it impossible to explain through natural processes.
The nickel-cyanide combination looks eerily familiar to something we know from human technology: nickel-cyanide electroplating. This industrial process is used to coat and protect metals like iron, creating a corrosion-resistant shell. When heated, such a coating releases nickel vapor and cyanide gas, the exact chemical fingerprint astronomers now see venting from 3I/ATLAS.
Renowned astrophysicist Avi Loeb has already highlighted this bizarre discovery, stressing that the nickel-only signature matches industrial alloy production rather than anything we’d expect from natural comet chemistry.
Pure nickel without iron: impossible in natural comets. Nickel + cyanide plume: matches electroplated coatings. Artificial signature: hallmark of industrial processes.
Putting it all together, so far: It is an interstellar visitor on a hyperbolic escape path. It has a carbon dioxide–dominated composition, nearly devoid of water. It has a dust plume points toward the Sun, breaking cometary rules. It has a trajectory which is perfectly aligned with the ecliptic plane. It shows mysterious acceleration without visible outgassing. It exhibits a forward glow, possible radio emissions, and signs of stabilization. It will perform planetary flybys. It probably has nuclear propulsion. It has an electroplated shell.
Mainstream astronomers remain cautious, still labeling 3I/ATLAS as a comet, but with mounting evidence, we may be staring at the first tangible proof of alien technology crossing our solar system, a probe from another civilization on a reconnaissance mission, silently mapping habitable worlds before making contact.View the full article
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