Anibal Martel/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images After over a month of government shutdown, NASA finally released new images of mysterious interstellar object 3I/ATLAS on Wednesday. During the livestreamed event, NASA brass took pains to “address the rumors,” with associate administrator Amit Kshatriya vehemently denying a theory championed by Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb that we could be looking at an alien spacecraft coming to visit from a different star system. “This object is a comet,” Kshatriya said. “It looks and behaves like a comet, and all evidence points towards it being a comet.” The announcement appears to have angered Loeb. In a blog post, the astronomer criticized NASA for repeating the “official mantra that 3I/ATLAS is a natural comet,” arguing that “there was no big news.” He quoted British author Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, that “there is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact” — effectively accusing NASA of misleadingly and prematurely discrediting his far-fetched theory. The tense back-and-forth highlights a fascinating discussion over what’s deemed acceptable in scientific discourse — and what …