In 2014, a bright fireball streaked across the sky over the Pacific Ocean near Papua New Guinea. It was an interstellar visitor, a rare meteor from outside our solar system. Its official name is CNEOS 2014-01-08, but it is also known as IM1, short for Interstellar Meteor 1.
IM1 was detected by the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It had a very high speed of about 60 km/s, much faster than any known asteroid or comet in our solar system. It also had a very unusual trajectory, coming from the direction of the constellation Lyra and leaving towards the constellation Pegasus.
But what was even more remarkable was what happened after IM1 exploded in the sky, about 18 km above sea level. A team of researchers led by Professor Avi Loeb of Harvard University conducted an extensive survey of the seafloor along IM1’s calculated path, using a towed magnetic sled device.
They collected hundreds of tiny spheres, spherical particles that form when molten material cools rapidly in air.
Early analyzes show that some spheroids from the meteor trail contain extremely high amounts of beryllium, lanthanum and uranium, labeled as a never-before-seen ‘BeLaU’ compound.
These elements are very rare in the solar system and their proportions do not match any known natural or artificial alloy or meteorite. The beads also contain very low levels of other elements, such as iron and manganese, indicating that they were vaporized during the air blast.
“Our research team’s analysis of 60 elements from the periodic table shows that these globules are not coal ash and do not come from the Earth’s crust, the moon or Mars. The BeLaU-type abundance pattern is unprecedented in the scientific literature and could originate from differentiation in a magma ocean on an exoplanet with an iron core.” say Avi Loeb.
The researchers hypothesize that these balls are of extrasolar origin, meaning that they come from another galaxy.
They suggest that they may have formed in the magma-ocean stage of a differentiated planet, where heavy elements sink to the core and light elements rise to the surface. The high concentration of beryllium could indicate that the planet has been exposed to cosmic rays in the interstellar medium for a long time.
But a draft paper by seismologist Benjamin Fernando of Johns Hopkins University and his colleagues, not yet peer-reviewed or published in a journal, concludes that the material found on the seafloor is “almost certainly unrelated” to the meteor.
Loeb, however, holds his ground. “This press release is from people who have not done any work. They didn’t collect materials, they didn’t analyze anything. They just sit in their seats and express their opinions.”
In a post on Medium, Loeb responded further. “The astronomers who… [satellite] data and arguing that it must be completely wrong should lose sleep at night because their distrust implies that their security is not assured and that their taxes are wasted on an unreliable national security infrastructure,” he wrote.
Loeb has since claimed that the chemical composition of some of the globules found in that search is unlike anything known in our solar system, and “could have come from a highly differentiated magma ocean of an iron-cored planet outside the solar system, or from more exotic sources”.
This is a groundbreaking discovery that could shed light on the formation and evolution of planets around other stars. It also raises many questions, such as: How did IM1 escape from its original galaxy? How long has it been traveling in interstellar space? How common are interstellar meteors and spheres? What other secrets do they have?
The researchers plan to continue their analysis of the spheroids and look for more evidence of their interstellar origins. They also hope to find more interstellar meteors in the future, using improved detection and recovery methods. They believe that studying these cosmic messengers could reveal new insights into the nature and diversity of life in the universe.
