ATLAS in Rio Hurtado, Chile caught it on July 1, 2025; the discovery paper (Seligman et al., ApJL 2025) gives an eccentricity near 6.1, perihelion 1.36 au on October 29, an orbit tilted 175 degrees, inbound at 58 km/s. JWST NIRSpec (Cordiner et al. 2025) found a coma dominated by CO2, with a CO2-to-water ratio of 7.6, 4.5 sigma off the comet trend. VLT spectroscopy caught nickel atoms switching on at over 4 au with no iron beside them, a first. Hubble pinned the nucleus under 2.8 km.
Avi Loeb's published case: the path lies within five degrees of the ecliptic, threads Venus, Mars and Jupiter, and hides its perihelion behind the Sun from Earth; his calculation put the Jupiter encounter odds near 1 in 26,000, and he floated a probe drop-off at Jupiter's orbit. His demand to NASA: justify the anomalies, do not ignore them.
Post-perihelion spectroscopy published January 2026 found behavior broadly consistent with ordinary comets; no maneuver, no signal, no structure. What survives as genuinely strange is quieter: orbital analyses (Hopkins et al.; Taylor and Seligman, 2025) trace it to the Milky Way's thick disk, likely billions of years older than the Sun, a cryogenic fossil from the galaxy's first generations.
One object in recorded history might have been a ship, and every instrument aimed at it saw ice and rock; did the anomalies shrink, or did the definition of normal quietly expand to fit?