Two Harvard scientists who led an expedition to the Pacific Ocean to retrieve particles of the first recognized interstellar meteor to impact Earth said the remains appear artificial in origin.
Harvard University astrophysicist and professor of science Avi Loeb and researcher Amir Siraj led a team that collected 50 tiny metallic spheres unmatched to any existing alloys in the solar system last week off the coast of Manus, Papua New Guinea.
"This composition is anomalous compared to human-made alloys, known asteroids and familiar astrophysical sources," Loeb told the Daily Mail, adding it might "move fast and are tough because they are artificial in origin, namely chemically propelled interstellar spacecraft."
A basketball-size object impacted Earth in the western Pacific in January 2014. The object was moving at a speed twice as fast as 95% of the stars in the vicinity of the sun, according to a news release by the Interstellar Expedition. It was too small to be noticed by telescopes, but its collision with the Earth generated a bright fireball recorded by U.S. government sensors.
Loeb and Siraj wrote a paper in 2019 that confirmed the interstellar origin of the object. And in March 2022, a memo from U.S. Space Command to NASA confirmed the researchers' findings. The object was called "Interstellar Meteor 1," or IM1.
Analysis of the fragments retrieved by the expedition at the University of California-Berkeley showed they were primarily made of iron, which is the principal element in the toughest-known natural meteors. The Daily Mail reported IM1 withstood four times the pressure that would typically destroy an ordinary iron-metal meteor as it hurtled through Earth's atmosphere at 100,215 mph.
"The possibility that IM1's excess speed benefited from propulsion and the fact that it was tougher than all known space rocks raise the possibility that it may have been technological in origin — similar to NASA's New Horizons craft colliding with an exoplanet in a billion years and burning up in its atmosphere as an interstellar meteor," Loeb wrote in a summary of the expedition. An exoplanet is a planet outside of our solar system.
Siraj told the Daily Mail: "It's really important to continue pushing the boundary in terms of destigmatizing the search for extraterrestrial life. If you don't consider a possibility, you usually won't discover something new."
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.