Metal Plucked From The Pacific Is Beyond Extraterrestrial, Harvard Prof Says

Millimeter-sized marbles recovered from the bottom of the ocean could have originated from the collapse of a distant star light years from our own sun, or they could be part of some technology designed by extra-terrestrial intelligence.

That’s the controversial claim made this week by long-time Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who leads the university’s Galileo Project to search for evidence of such alien artifacts.

The tiny metal balls, or spherules, in question were gathered from the South Pacific sea floor using magnetic sleds earlier this year.

Loeb and others believe they are the remains of IM1 (for interstellar meteor 1) , a meteorite that entered Earth’s atmosphere at high speed on January 8, 2014. Much of the space rock burned up completely as it sizzled through the sky. But Loeb believes he now possesses several hundred bits of metal that melted as they heated up in the atmosphere that day, only to cool when they fell in the Pacific and hardened into shiny little spheres.

MORE FROM FORBESMeteorites Plucked From The Ocean Floor May Be Interstellar Alien WreckageBy Eric Mack

Classified measurements from military satellites would later lead to a letter from US Space Command to NASA confirming that IM1 was of interstellar origin.

Now, after a few months of testing and analysis, Loeb has released a paper concluding that the chemical composition of the spherules points to a source beyond our solar system.

Specifically, high amounts of beryllium, lanthanum and uranium suggest that they could “have originated from a highly differentiated magma ocean of a planet with an iron core outside the solar system or from more exotic sources.”

The paper has been submitted for publication in an unnamed scientific journal, according to a statement from the Galileo Project. A complete draft is available online that has not yet been peer reviewed.

The expedition was funded in large part by Charles Hoskinson, who played a role in the creation of the cryptocurrencies Ethereum and Cardano.

“This is a historic discovery, marking the first time that humans hold materials from a large interstellar object, and I am extremely pleased with these results from this rigorous scientific analysis,” Hoskinson said.

Not Quite A Consensus

Loeb spent decades making a name for himself in astronomy and astrophysics, largely by studying black holes and taking a turn at the head of Harvard’s astronomy department.

His career took a seemingly abrupt turn shortly after an odd, oblong object named Oumuamua made an unpredicted turn of its own through our solar systemin 2017. The object seemed to drop into our cosmic neighborhood from another star system, made a sharp turn around our sun and then looked to accelerate inexplicably on its way back out to deep space.

Loeb and colleagues spent years studying, analyzing and hypothesizing about Oumuamua and all its weirdness, culminating in his 2021 book, Extraterrestrial, which posits that the object was likely a piece of technology sent in our direction long ago by some sort of alien intelligence.

The scientific community did not rally around Loeb’s hypothesis, to say the least.

Arizona State University astrophysicist Steve Desch has been highly critical of Loeb’s ideas, from Oumuamua to IM1. At issue in the case of the meteorite fragments that Loeb’s team went to great lengths to retrieve are the military observations that point to an interstellar origin for IM1.

“No scientist trusts those numbers, and it’s very likely this meteor came from our solar system,” Desch told Michael Shermer of Skeptic Magazine.

The issue with the data is that it’s classified and scientists haven’t been able to review it. For his part, Loeb told Shermer he’s satisfied with the word of Department of Defense astronomers who say they double-checked the numbers and later reported them to NASA.

“They went to the effort of writing an official letter to NASA stating this conclusion with 99.99 percent confidence.”

There’s a number of other criticisms of Loeb’s findings and approach, some of which he addresses in the above podcast with Shermer.

Among the most basic and compelling of these is the simple fact that a strong link hasn’t been established between the spherules collected and the meteorite that was observed over the Pacific nearly a decade ago. Desch points out that there are other potential sources of the material Loeb found, including volcanoes on earth and human industrial activity.

That alone seems like enough reasonable doubt to fuel Loeb’s critics for quite a long time.

But he’s shown no indication of giving up the search anytime soon, so perhaps a small pile of spherules today will be part of a mountain of evidence for interstellar visitation years from now.

Denial of responsibility! TechCodex is an automatic aggregator of the all world’s media. In each content, the hyperlink to the primary source is specified. All trademarks belong to their rightful owners, and all materials to their authors. For any complaint, please reach us at – [email protected]. We will take necessary action within 24 hours.