Scientists have analyzed interstellar matter on Earth for the first time in history.
Harvard physicist Avi Loeb announced on Tuesday that the hundreds of tiny metal fragments recovered from the Pacific Ocean came from outside our solar system.
The remains came from a meter-long object that crashed off the coast of Papua, New Guinea in 2014, which Loeb said was an extraterrestrial craft.
He and a team spent two weeks in June scouring the seabed in hopes of recovering evidence to support his theory.
Although the announcement does not confirm the presence of extraterrestrials, Loeb considers it a historic discovery “because it represents the first time that humans have had their hands on material from a large object that has arrived. on Earth from outside the solar system”.
The remains came from a meter-long object that crashed off the coast of Papua, New Guinea in 2014, which Loeb said was an extraterrestrial craft.
“The success of the expedition illustrates the importance of taking risks in science, despite all obstacles, as an opportunity to discover new knowledge,” Loeb wrote on AVERAGE.
Loeb and his team traveled to a site where the IM1 meteor is believed to have crashed almost a decade ago.
Harvard scientists spent years working closely with the U.S. military to determine the impact zone near Papua New Guinea, sifting through the data to determine if and when the object fell from the ‘space.
US Space Command confirmed in April 2022 that the 1.5-foot-wide meteorite originated from another solar system, making it the first known interstellar visitor to Earth.
And that, according to Loeb, provides more evidence to support his theory.
Loeb made a name for himself openly believing that extraterrestrials have made contact with Earth.
In 2021, the physicist published a book called “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth”, which claimed that Oumuamu was not a comet or an asteroid but a light sail – a method of propulsion of spacecraft.
Oumuamua was discovered in October 2017 by a telescope in Hawaii, millions of miles away, and was initially believed to be Earth’s first interstellar visitor until 2022.
Harvard physicist Avi Loeb announced on Tuesday that the hundreds of tiny metal fragments recovered from the Pacific Ocean came from outside our solar system.
Data from the analysis showed that the fragments are rich in beryllium, lanthanum and uranium, as well as low in elements with high affinity for iron, such as rhenium. Pictured is the composition of a fragment found at the site
Loeb and his team found 700 spherules with a diameter of between 0.05 and 1.3 millimeters through 26 scans covering a study area measuring a quarter of a square kilometer.
“The recovered spherules are analyzed by the best instruments in the world in four laboratories at Harvard University, UC Berkeley, Bruker Corporation and Papua New Guinea University of Technology – whose Vice Chancellor has signed a memorandum of understanding with Harvard University for partnership on expedition research,” Loeb wrote.
Data from the analysis showed that the fragments are rich in beryllium, lanthanum and uranium, as well as low in elements with high affinity for iron, such as rhenium, one of the rarest elements found on Earth. .
“The spherules exhibiting the abundance of ‘BeLaU’ were only found along the IM1 pathway and not in the control regions,” Loeb wrote.
“The ‘BeLaU’ element abundance pattern does not match terrestrial alloys, fallout from nuclear explosions, the abundances of the magmatic oceans of Earth, its Moon, or Mars, or other naturally occurring meteorites in the solar system. .”
He went on to explain that BeLaU also had an “overabundance of heavy elements,” which could come from ejected fragments from ore-collapse supernovae or neutron star mergers. This is called the “R process”.
However, the combination also shows another pattern associated with the so-called “s-process” that could only come from an independent origin, such as Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) stars.
AGB stars are the last evolutionary stage of low and intermediate mass stars driven by nuclear combustion.
