The appearance of a mysterious interstellar object has reignited debate over whether extraterrestrial technology could be hiding in our solar system. 

NASA detected the object, dubbed 3I/ATLAS, on July 1, sparking a flurry of scientific analysis to determine its origin.

While more than 200 researchers have concluded it is likely a comet, Harvard physicist Avi Loeb has raised doubts in a newly released pre-print paper, pointing to one glaring omission: 3I/ATLAS has no visible tail. 

'There were claims of a tail,' Loeb said, 'but since 3I/ATLAS is accelerating and its current size is not much larger than the angular resolution of Earth-based telescopes, it is not easy to avoid fictitious elongation of the image as a result of the object's motion.'