📌 TOPINDIATOURS Breaking ai: Two Spacecraft Orbiting Mars Just Spotted the Mysteri

As our solar system’s interstellar visitor hides behind the Sun, humankind’s expeditions to Mars have stepped up to provide an extra set of eyes.

On Tuesday, the European Space Agency announced that two of its spacecraft orbiting the Red Planet had used their cameras to snap photos of the mysterious object, dubbed 3I/ATLAS, as it whizzed past over 18 million miles away from them.

The photos were taken on October 3, when 3I/ATLAS made its closest approach to Mars, using the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) and the Mars Express spacecraft. 

In a series of images captured with the TGO’s Color and Stereo Surface Imaging System (CaSSIS), a glowing dot can clearly be seen inching downward across the black expanse of space. That mobile dot is the coma of the interstellar object, which is widely believed to be a comet.

“Though our Mars orbiters continue to make impressive contributions to Mars science, it’s always extra exciting to see them responding to unexpected situations like this one,” Colin Wilson, the ESA’s Mars Express and ExoMars project scientist, said in a statement. “I look forward to seeing what the data reveals following further analysis.” 

Deputizing the Mars spacecraft to try observe the comet was a literal shot in the dark, since both of their cameras are designed for imaging Mars’ well-lit surface, and not tiny specks in the night sky — but it paid off. 3I/ATLAS in the CaSSIS timelapse is as clear as day, showing that its coma — the glowing halo of gas and dust that gives comets their distinct look — is around several thousand miles across. 

Comas form as a comet nears the Sun and starts to heat up. This causes the material trapped in its core called a nucleus to either sublimate or evaporate, forcing gas and dust to come pouring out of its shell. These are thousands of times larger than the actual nucleus itself.

“This was a very challenging observation for the instrument,” Nick Thomas, principal investigator of the CaSSIS camera, said in a statement. “The comet is around 10,000 to 100,000 times fainter than our usual target.” 

While the coma is easily spotted, the CaSSIS image couldn’t distinguish the nucleus at its center. That’s because, as the ESA explains, imaging the less-than-a-mile-across nucleus “would’ve been as impossible as seeing a mobile phone on the Moon from Earth.”

The Mars Express also turned its gaze towards the comet, but scientists are still examining the images to reveal it. Unlike the TGO’s instrument which was able to take pictures with a five second exposure, the Mars Express camera could only use an exposure time of half a second.

The ESA’s announcement comes just a day after speculation that a fellow Martian explorer, the NASA Perseverance rover, had caught a glimpse of 3I/ATLAS, which appeared as a blurry, cylindrical streak. The idea was propounded by famed Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who’s been prolifically writing about the object since it was first spotted (and in which he’s never missed an opportunity to float the possibility that the object is the work of aliens.) 

But that may not be the case. David Kipping, an astrophysicist famous for his work on exoplanets and who runs the YouTube channel Cool Worlds, was skeptical that the rover’s puny camera would’ve been able to spot the comet. 

On his social media, Kipping argued that the likelier explanation for what was actually depicted in the image was Phobos, the innermost of Mars’ two moons. Astrophotographer Simeon Schmauß agreed that it was almost certainly Phobos, and added that the Martian moon only appeared cylindrical because of the image’s long exposure.

That likely false alarm underscores the excitement around 3I/ATLAS, which is only the third interstellar object known to visit our solar system in history. This one is unbelievably ancient, too: astronomers estimate that it may be more than seven billion years old, making it more than 3 billion years older than the Sun. Over those untold eons, it traveled from a star system somewhere near the center of the Milky Way, where it was likely ejected by a gravitational disturbance like a passing star.

Examining 3I/ATLAS has provided us with unprecedented insights into foreign star systems. Its chemistry is wildly different from the comets of our solar system, including having an unusually high ratio of carbon dioxide to water. Dazzling the eyes, it also began changing color before it disappeared behind the Sun.

Unpacking all the data gathered on the comet will take years. But in the meantime, the ESA says it’ll try take even more observations with 3I/ATLAS using its Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice). These photos are expected to be extra juicy — pun intended — because they’ll be capturing the comet right after it finishes its closest approach to the Sun, when it will be most active.

More on 3I/ATLAS: The Mysterious Object Cruising Through Solar System Is Releasing Strange Metals, Paper Finds

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📌 TOPINDIATOURS Eksklusif ai: Bank of England Warns of Impending AI Disaster Hari

The Bank of England has sounded the alarm, warning of an intensifying risk of a “sudden correction” in global financial markets driven by the spending frenzy on artificial intelligence.

As Reuters points out, it’s the institution’s clearest warning yet that we could be on the precipice of an AI disaster.

“The risk of a sharp market correction has increased,” said the Bank of England’s financial policy committee during a Wednesday meeting, as quoted by Reuters, warning that “equity market valuations appear stretched, particularly for technology companies focused on artificial intelligence.”

“Should expectations around the impact of AI become less optimistic,” markets could be left “particularly exposed,” the bank cautioned.

Concerns over an AI bubble bursting have grown lately, with analysts recently finding that it’s 17 times the size of the dotcom-era bubble and four times bigger than the 2008 financial crisis.

Analysts — and even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman himself — have acknowledged that AI companies are struggling to make enough money to cover their exorbitant expenses, concerns that drove a major tech selloff earlier this year.

And whether they’ll ever be able to produce enough revenue is a looming question. A startling report by researchers at MIT spooked investors in August, finding that only a measly five percent of AI pilot programs help businesses succeed at “rapid revenue acceleration,” with the vast majority falling flat.

Yet according to recent estimates, generative AI now accounts for roughly 40 percent of the United States’ gross domestic product. In other words, if the AI spending boom falls apart, it could take down the entire economy with it.

Fund manager and former Morgan Stanley investor Ruchir Sharma warned in a recent piece for the Financial Times that the US economy has turned into “one big bet on AI.”

“AI companies have accounted for 80 per cent of the gains in US stocks so far in 2025,” he wrote. “That is helping to fund and drive US growth, as the AI-driven stock market draws in money from all over the world, and feeds a boom in consumer spending by the rich.”

Put simply, only the extremely wealthy appear to be benefiting from all of this.

“The top ten percent of earners account for half of consumer spending,” Sharma added, “the highest share on record since the data begins.”

“The AI trade is beginning to resemble one of the great speculative manias of market history,” Selwood Asset Management chief investment officer of equities Karim Moussalem wrote in a LinkedIn post last week. “For me, there is no denying that we are in the midst of a bubble, and a total retail-driven frenzy.”

Meanwhile, the White House has stoked ongoing fears of a major correction, with president Donald Trump repeatedly urging the US central bank to slash interest rates in an effort to make interest payments on US debt more affordable.

“A sudden or significant change in perceptions of Federal Reserve credibility could result in a sharp repricing of US dollar assets, including in US sovereign debt markets, with the potential for increased volatility, risk premia and global spillovers,” the Bank of England warned, as quoted by Reuters.

However, tech leaders are mostly soaring above the anxiety about an AI bubble, or even flipping those concerns around to frame the possibility as a positive: during an event last week, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos claimed that if such a bubble were to burst, “it can even be good, because when the dust settles and you see who are the winners, societies benefits from those inventions.”

“This is real, the benefits to society from AI are going to be gigantic,” Bezos added.

More on the AI bubble: The Entire Economy Now Depends on the AI Industry Not Fumbling

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