Since first encountering news of an unusual meteor descending toward Earth, astrophysicist Avi Loeb has been resolute in his quest to determine whether this event was associated with an alien artifact crashing into the Pacific Ocean.
Currently, Professor Loeb, a theoretical astrophysicist at Harvard University, along with a team of scientists, reports that he is one step closer to establishing the true nature of the incident.
In June, they successfully recovered suspected fragments of the meteor from the Papua New Guinea area. Loeb revealed in a press release Tuesday that preliminary analysis indicates that these tiny metal components do indeed originate in interstellar space.
While the findings haven’t conclusively shown whether the metal spheres are products of man-made creation or of naturally occurring entities, Loeb underscores that the team is now confident that their discoveries are distinct from any of the alloys known in our solar system.
“This is a historic discovery because it is the first time humans have gotten their hands on materials from a large object that arrived on Earth from outside the solar system,” Loeb wrote Tuesday on Medium, where he documented the expedition and ensuing investigations.
“The success of the expedition illustrates the value of taking risks in science, despite all odds, as an opportunity to discover new knowledge.”
Led by Loeb, the team of scientists and researchers hired EYOS Expeditions and boarded a boat called the Silver Star bound for Papa New Guinea in June.
It was north of the country where the crew, funded with $1.5 million from entrepreneur Charles Hoskinson, spent two weeks trying to retrieve whatever remains they could find of an unusual meteorite they dubbed IM1 that crashed into the 2014 Earth’s atmosphere had collapsed, reports usatoday.com.
Meteor data recorded by US government sensors went unnoticed for five years until Loeb and Amir Siraj, a Harvard student at the time, found it in 2019 and published their findings. However, it was another three years before the US Space Command announced in a letter to NASA in March 2022 that the object came from another solar system.
The revelation was a vindication for Loeb, co-founder of the Galileo Project, a research program at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics dedicated to the scientific search for extraterrestrial technology. Seven months later, he and his team were 53 miles off the coast of Manus Island, combing more than 100 miles of ocean floor with a magnet-loaded sled attached to a winch on the ship’s deck.
As luck would have it, they found what they were looking for: more than 700 submillimetre-sized spheres from 26 runs with the sled that are so miniscule you need a microscope to see them.
“This is a historic discovery, marking the first time humans have held materials from a large interstellar object,” Hoskinson said in a statement. “I am extremely pleased with these results of this rigorous scientific analysis.”
Initial analyzes show that specific spheres found during the meteor’s trajectory show “remarkably high levels” of an unprecedented combination of dense elements.
Experts on the research team reveal that this unique amalgamation of beryllium, lanthanum and uranium, dubbed the ‘BeLaU’ composition, differs from known terrestrial alloys native to Earth, as well as remnants resulting from nuclear detonations.
In addition, this composition does not match materials found in Earth’s magma oceans, nor does it match the chemical composition of the Moon, Mars, or other naturally occurring meteorites in our solar system.
Certain elements are believed to have evaporated during the meteor’s passage through Earth’s atmosphere, prompting researchers to hypothesize that these spherules could possibly have come from a magma ocean on an iron-core exoplanet beyond Earth. limits of our solar system.
