Harvard professor claims crashed meteorite was interstellar
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This June, Avi Loeb, a professor of astrophysics at Harvard University, embarked on a two-week voyage onboard a boat. His team was on a special mission to find any remnants of a meteorite that reportedly crashed into the Earth's atmosphere nearly a decade ago. Loeb wrote in a Medium post recently that the tiny metallic spheres the team found during this voyage are interstellar in origin.
Meteorites are small fragments of celestial rock that enter a planet's atmosphere and survive the trip to hit the ground. Most meteorites that have fallen to Earth come from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. So, a claim for one coming from much further out in space and not even from our own solar system is huge.
None of Loeb's claims though would have even come to light as the discovery of the meteorite itself was accidental and did not happen until 2019.
The lost interstellar meteorite
In 2017, a strange-looking comet zipping through our solar system was spotted. Scientists referred to it as Oumuamua, Hawaiian for “scout” or “messenger,” and Loeb was quick to suggest that it had alien origins.
Loeb hypothesized that the comet, which was thin but long like a football field was harnessing solar power through its long light sails and this was alien technology at work. Other researchers, however, debunked these claims and suggested alternate explanations for the comet's appearance.
To prove this hypothesis, Loeb's team began looking at data from similar fireballs in the sky and it was here that they noticed a meteorite that crashed in 2014. Dubbed IM1, the meteorite was too small to be noticed by telescopes but its impact was measured by US sensors.
The team's paper on this discovery was finally validated in 2022 when the US Space Command confirmed that IM1's origins weren't from our solar system. Seven months later, Loeb's team took the voyage off the coast of Manus island to comb 100 miles of the Pacific Ocean floor in hopes of recovering remnants of the meteorite.
Finding the interstellar meteorite
Loeb's expedition was onboard a boat christened Silver Star and equipped with a sled full of magnets. The team completed 26 runs where the sled looked for the meteorite's remains and tasted major success as they found more than 700 metallic spheres, which were so small that they needed a microscope to be seen.
Back on land, the team has now completed an early analysis of these remains and found that they were composed of heavy elements such as Beryllium (Be), Lanthanum (La), and Uranium (U) or BeLaU. This composition is not typical in naturally found alloys on Earth or the result of a nuclear explosion.
The team is also confident that the composition of elements is not native to the Moon, Mars, or other places within our solar system, pointing toward a higher likelihood that it has come from a different star system altogether.
The claims have not been peer reviewed yet but Loeb stated in his post that the publication is currently under process.
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