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Guaranteed Human.

Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on IHeart Radio.

And welcome back to coast to coast.

George Norrie with Avi Lob with us.

Avi, what took us so long to discover Three-Eye Atlas?

Well, it wasn't too long.

It was at a distance of five times the Earth's separation. So it's basically up to our survey telescope to find it. And that was a small telescope,

half a meter in size called Atlas in Chile, the discovery, because it was relatively bright.

And then other observers found the 3-I Atlas in their images a few months earlier, actually.

But we are basically limited by the fact that the brightness of an object that reflects sunlight declines

inversely with distance to the fourth power. So when the object is far, it's extremely dim.

And now we have the Rubin Observatory in Chile that started operations in June this year,

and it should be far more sensitive than the Atlas telescope.

And we hope to find a new interstellar object every few months with the Rubin Observatory.

So that will be in the southern sky.

It has a camera of 3.2 gigapixels a thousand times

more pixels than your cell phone camera and also it covers the southern sky every four nights

we need a similar twin telescope in the northern hemisphere so that we can cover the entire sky.

We don't have it at the moment.

But that's the best path forward to basically identify interstellar objects by their high speed.

They are supposed to be moving faster than the speed necessary to escape from the gravitational pull of the sun.

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