Rapid Brightening of 3i/atlas Ahead of Perihelion

He'll have the same to say about the next one.

Does everyone at any prestigious institution have some duty to remain conventionally mundane in all their musings?

Is there any reason to think such hypotheticals are, on net, more harmful than helpful?

Isn't tenure (like Loeb's) designed to encourage a fearlessness around topics & speech?

> even saying “if it turns out of being a rock, so be it”

I don't doubt it! He'll get another chance the next time we spot another one.

But also sometimes monitoring the world is useful. I'm very glad I was paying attention in February 2020, for instance!

Welcome! I certainly hope this universe is better than your original one

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ESA%E2%80%99s_Mars_a...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3I/ATLAS#Trajectory

We can spot a single photon in the right conditions. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12172

You're comparing the Sun's illuminance at Earth (10^5 lux at 1 AU) to all starlight combined (10^-4 lux), then trying to work backward to what a single star should provide. That's not how this works.

The question isn't "what's the ratio between sunlight and all starlight." The question is: what happens when you move the Sun to stellar distances using inverse square law?

At 1 AU: ~10^5 lux

At 544,000 AU: 10^5 / (544,000)^2 = 10^5 / 3×10^11 ≈ 3×10^-7 lux

That's the Sun at Sirius's distance. Multiply by 25 for Sirius's actual luminosity: ~7.5×10^-6 lux.

Your own Wikipedia source says the faintest stars visible to naked eye are around 10^-5 to 10^-4 lux. So we're borderline at best, and that's with the 25× boost.

But moreover, you said "the difference between all starlight and just Sirius would be around 10^2." There are ~5,000-9,000 stars visible to the naked eye. If Sirius provides 1/100th of all visible starlight, and there are thousands of other stars, the math doesn't work. You can't have one star be 1% of the total while thousands of others make up the rest - unless most stars are providing almost nothing, which contradicts the "slightly brighter" compensation model.

Address the core issue: inverse square law predicts invisibility. The 25× luminosity factor is insufficient compensation. Citing aggregate starlight illuminance doesn't resolve this.

Here, the math doesn't check out. That's my point.

I'm not saying "it seems like stars should be invisible but they're not", Im showing that inverse square law - which we can verify at human scales - predicts invisibility at stellar distances, and the proposed compensation (25x more luminosity) is insufficient by orders of magnitude.

Sirius is "billions of times dimmer" than the sun to our eyes IF you mean the Sun as seen from Earth versus Sirius as seen from Earth. But that's not the comparison. The comparison is:

Sun moved to 544,000 AU (Sirius's distance): 296 billion times dimmer than Sun at 1 AU Sirius at 544,000 AU: 25x brighter than that

25x doesn't bridge a 296-billion-fold gap, plus the eye's dynamic range is irrelevant; we're comparing what brightness should reach the eye versus what compensation the model claims.

If your claim is "the eye can see across many orders of magnitude, so even though the Sun would be invisible at stellar distances, Sirius being slightly brighter makes it visible," then do the actual calculation. Show that 25x more luminosity produces enough photons to cross the detection threshold. Because the math I'm showing says it doesn't.

You're assuming the model works and looking for why my intuition is wrong. I'm showing the model's numbers are internally inconsistent. Those aren't the same thing.

>I've found that when I have a thought that seems to contradict the "established" model of the world, I tend to just be missing some critical factor.

Does it bother you that to make relativity work, they had to invent dark matter and dark energy - 96% of the universe's mass-energy - as fudge factors? At what point does "missing a critical factor" become "the model requires constant patching to match observations"?