Does a video clip show new footage of the Comet 3I/ATLAS? No, that's not true: This video did not originate from any research astronomy agency monitoring the interstellar comet. It is uncredited footage showing a microscopic single-celled organism, a paramecium.
A reverse Google image search on Oct. 29, 2025 using the above screenshot fails to produce any relevant results. In fact, the search engine's AI overview has adopted the false captions associated with this video clip (pictured below) and wrongly asserts that "The image shows the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS."
Lead Stories reached out to The Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego to ask an expert microbiologist or protistologist if they could identify the organism appearing in the short video clip. Jack A. Gilbert, Professor in Pediatrics and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, responded by email on Oct. 29, 2025. Gilbert is Associate Vice Chancellor for Marine Science, Director of the Microbiome and Metagenomics Center, and President of Applied Microbiology International. He wrote:
Currently the NASA webpage (archived here) where multimedia content about the Comet 3I/ATLAS would be posted displays a notice (pictured below) which reads:
There are images (archived here) which were posted by NASA in July and August (pictured below). None resemble the video of the paramecium.
An image (pictured below) posted by the NOIRLab (National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory) was released on Sept. 4, 2025 (archived here). The photo's caption explains why the stars appear as colorful streaks: