Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb’s ambitious interstellar expedition has found 50 fragments of IM1, a meteorite he says came to Earth from outside the solar system. Now the research is aimed at finding out if they are of natural origin or if they come from an extraterrestrial vessel.
“In December 1926, Albert Einstein He wrote the famous letter to physicist Max Born in which he argued that God does not play dice. The letter referred to the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, but it can also be interpreted more broadly because nature does not make random decisions. (…) The range of possibilities as often imagined in math or science fiction stories, it is much larger and sometimes it does not coincide with what is really happening in nature”.
This is how astronomer Avi Loeb begins a trial published on The Debrief website which marked the beginning of an ambitious project: search for the remnants of a meteorite that fell into the ocean which he thinks may well be the remains of alien technology.
With the expedition to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean now complete, Professor Avi Loeb, chairman of Harvard’s astronomy department from 2011 to 2020 and now director of Ivy League University’s ET fighter Galileo project, he claims he may have discovered the small remains of an alien spacecraft, but there is still much to investigate.
The story goes back to April 6, when a leaked document from the United States Space Command (USSC) confirmed that an object from another star system crashed into Earth in 2014, dubbed IM1.
According to this report, it is a fireball that burned in the skies of Papua New Guinea in 2014, and which according to the memorandum originated from another star system.
“He study meteor was initially questioned because the uncertainties in its speed measurements were secret. The publication of the confirmation letter is a decisive moment in which the government helps scientific progress confirming the interstellar origin of this meteor dubbed CNEOS-2014-01-08 with 99.999% confidence” added Loeb in The Debrief.
But perhaps the most fascinating and at the same time controversial thing about the expedition that Loeb organizes is that the astronomer suspects that there is at the bottom of the sea in Polynesia, it could be the remains of an extraterrestrial artifact.
Earlier this month Loeb’s team, which he describes as “probably the best in the world”, boarded a vessel called Silver Star to search for the wreckage of IM1 in the South Pacific. . On June 21, he seems to have achieved his goal when he finally finds small spherical fragments called spherules.
To find the spherules, Loeb’s team used a large magnet that moved along the ocean floor, with it they were able to find a total of 50 tiny fragments of a strange mixture of iron, magnesium and titanium. In his most recent column in El Confidencial He said that “given the high speed of IM1 and the anomalous resistance of its materials, its origin must have been a natural environment other than the solar system or an extraterrestrial technological civilization”.
The spherules were found in the most probable trajectory of IM1 and not in the control regions far from this trajectory. “The locations will guide us on our next expedition in search of large IM1 remains,” he wrote in his column.
While Loeb seems certain that the small fragments, only a third of a millimeter in size, come from IM1, other scientists are skeptical of the alien theory and noted that earth processes can also create spherules.
“Tiny metallic spherules are extremely common on Earth,” NASA cosmic dust curator Marc Fries told the BBC. “They come from car exhaust, vehicle brakes, welds, volcanoes and probably a few other sources that we haven’t identified.”
Despite the retractors, the astronomer writes in his column that “our knowledge is incomplete and that we must take into account the possibility that anomalous data may suggest the existence of new knowledge which we should investigate.”
This is not the first time that a Loeb theory has received so much media and scientific attention. In 2021, he wondered if the Universe was born from a Big Bang, what happened before? According to a opinion piece (published in Scientific American), the answer can be surprisingly fascinating. According to the scientist, the cosmos as we know it could be a “baby universe” created by an advanced technological civilization in a laboratory.
Loeb had already shaken the foundations of science with his exotic theories. As former chairman (2011-2020) of the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University, founding director of the Black Hole Initiative of Harvard (BHI), director of the Institute of Theory and Computer Science (ITC) of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), and one of the main researchers of the Galileo Project Loeb’s theories cannot be ignored.
The astronomer is the author of the bestselling book Alien: the first sign of intelligent life beyond Earth which concluded to the possibility that the interstellar object called Oumuamua is in fact an artificial probe.
IM1 rivals Oumuamua, discovered in 2017. Due to its high speed, around 92,000 km/h, some astronomers concluded that it was not native to our system and came from another different planetary system of ours.
“The detection of the meteor on January 8, 2014 preceded that of the first known interstellar object -Oumuamua- by nearly four years and should be recognized as the first massive interstellar object ever discovered,” the astronomer wrote.
According to the astronomer, upon encountering Earth and touching its atmosphere, “an interstellar object burns into a brilliant fireball.” This fireball is detectable by satellite or surface sensors, even in the case of relatively small interstellar objects, such as CNEOS-2014-01-08, which measured about one meter and created a fireball with a fraction of the the energy of the Hiroshima bomb.
While the researchers brought instruments for preliminary analysis aboard the Silver Star, the real work begins now, when Loeb’s team studies the mysterious iron spheres with more precise lab equipment in the United States.
The team hopes to analyze the samples with a spectrometer at Harvard to identify the isotopes inside. “Now we need to take them back to the Harvard College Observatory and analyze their elemental composition and the abundance of radioactive isotopes. “, he explained in his column. So there’s still a chance they found remnants of a completely different star system.
Source: Latercera
I am David Jack and I have been working in the news industry for over 10 years. As an experienced journalist, I specialize in covering sports news with a focus on golf. My articles have been published by some of the most respected publications in the world including The New York Times and Sports Illustrated.
