Scientists claim they have recovered material that originated outside our solar system for the first time in history.
Alien-hunting Harvard physicist Professor Avi Loeb said early analysis of metal fragments his team recovered from the Pacific Ocean in June suggests they came from interstellar space.
The remnants came from a meteor-like object that crashed off the coast of Papua New Guinea in 2014, which Professor Loeb is not ruling out could have been fragments of an alien craft.
The team found about 700 tiny metallic spheres during the expedition, and the 57 analyzed contain compositions that do not match any natural or man-made alloys.
The findings do not yet answer whether the spheres are artificial or natural in origin – which Professor Loeb said is the next question his research aims to answer.
‘This is a historic discovery because it represents the first time that humans put their hand on materials from a large object that arrived to Earth from outside the solar system, Professor Loeb said Tuesday.
The remnants came from a meter-size object that crashed off the coast of Papua, New Guinea in 2014, which Professor Loeb claims was an alien craft
A Harvard duo recovered 50 unusual iron spheres after tracking down the unidentified object, known as IM1, off the coast of Papua New Guinea last week as part of a $ 1.5 million underwater search mission
Harvard physicist Avi Loeb announced Tuesday that the hundreds of tiny metal fragments recovered from the Pacific Ocean originated outside our solar system
Throughout their two-week Pacific voyage, the Galileo team scoured the seabed for signs of IM1 debris, dragging a deep-sea magnetic sled along the fireball’s last known trajectory. Pictured is Loeb (right)
The composition analysis of the spherules was performed by Stein Jacobsen and his cosmochemistry laboratory team at Harvard University.
Professor Loeb told DailyMail.com: ‘I was thrilled when Stein Jacobsen reported to me about it based on the results in his laboratory.
‘Stein is a highly conservative and professional geochemist with a worldwide reputation.
‘He had no bias or agenda whatsoever and expected to find familiar spherules with solar system composition.
‘But the data showed something new, never reported in the scientific literature. Science is guided by evidence.’
Professor Loeb also told DailyMail.com that future research would answer whether the fragments are simply part of a space rock or the debris of alien technology that has been floating through the cosmos for millennia.
‘For now, we wanted to check whether the materials are from outside the solar system,’ he said.
‘The success of the expedition illustrates the value of taking risks in science despite all odds as an opportunity for discovering new knowledge.’
Loeb and his team published their study on the findings, which has yet to be peer-reviewed.
It states the fragments – known as spherules – appeared to be nested, suggesting that liquid drops engulfed smaller ones that solidified earlier.
And textures on surfaces of the round objects point to a rapid cooling.
The composition analysis of the spherules was performed by Stein Jacobsen (right) and his cosmochemistry laboratory team at Harvard University. Center is Avi Loeb and left is Sophie Bergstrom
The data from the analysis showed that the fragments are rich in Beryllium, lanthanum and uranium, along with low content of elements with high affinity to iron, like Rhenium. Pictured is the composition of a fragment found at the site
Professor Loeb used advanced technology to probe the inside of the tiny spheres, allowing him to see detailed patterns of the elements
Analysis of the fragments showed they are rich in Beryllium, lanthanum and uranium, along with low content of elements that bind to iron, like Rhenium – one of the rarest elements found on Earth.
While the elements are found on Earth, Professor Loeb explained the patterns do not match the alloys found on our planet, moon, Mars or other natural meteorites in the solar system.
”BeLaU’ abundance pattern found in IM1’s spherules could have possibly originated from a highly differentiated planetary magma ocean,’ reads the study.
The document continues to explain that the element patterns differ from bodies in our solar system, including Earth’s upper continental crust.
Professor Loeb also theorizes that because the combination of BeLaU has an ‘overabundance of heavy elements,’ the fragments could have been ejected from supernovae or neutron star mergers.
However, the pattern is associated with the ‘s-process’ that suggests the debris originated from an independent origin, such as Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) stars.
AGB stars are the final evolution stage of low- and intermediate-mass stars driven by nuclear burning.
Professor Loeb’s future research plans to unravel the puzzle.
For years, He has argued that Earth may have been visited by interstellar technology.
In 2017, an interstellar object named Oumuamua passed through the Solar System, and while most scientists believe it was a natural phenomenon, Professor Loeb famously argued it may have been of alien origin.
After the discovery of Oumuamua in 2017, Professor Loeb theorized – despite much criticism – that more interstellar objects had likely whizzed past Earth.
He was vindicated in 2019 when a student discovered that a high-speed fireball in 2014, the IM1 meteor, also had interstellar origins, predating Oumuamua.
Roughly two dozen people, including scientists with Harvard’s Galileo Project Expedition, the ship’s crew and documentary filmmakers chronicling the endeavor, set sail from the island town of Lorengau on June 14 onboard the Silver Star
The 50 iron spheres recovered from the Pacific (above) were analyzed at Berkeley in a lab. They were shown to be ‘anomalous’
The Harvard scientists spent years working closely with the US military to pinpoint the impact zone, combing through data to determine if and when the object fell from space.
Air friction burst IM1 into flames in mid-air as it careened towards Earth, leaving a trail of molten iron rain droplets in its wake on January 8 of that year.
The discovery that these interstellar metal fragments could be dredged from the Pacific with powerful magnets led to Professor Loeb and his Galileo team’s latest mission.
This past June, Professor Loeb and his team traveled to a site where the meteor IM1 was believed to have crashed nearly a decade ago.
Also known as CNEOS1 2014-01-08, the object had an estimated diameter of 1.5 feet, a mass of 1,014 pounds and a pre-impact velocity of 37.3 miles per second.
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 miles per hour.
Iron is already the principal ingredient in the toughest known kinds of natural meteors, so the Harvard duo has theorized that there must be something highly unusual about how the object came to be made.
And now a battery of tests on the recovered IM1 fragments has proven that their chemical make-up is almost entirely iron: strong evidence in favor of the Harvard team’s most controversial theories about the object.
Professor Loeb explained that the patterns found in BeLaU do not match the alloys found on Earth, our moon, Mars or other natural meteorites in the solar system.’
The heatmap shows the predicted IM1 path (orange box) and the DoD error region (red box)
The Harvard team took care to ensure that the 700 or so spherical iron fragments dredged up from over one mile below the surface of the Pacific were, in fact, actual remnants from IM1.
First, the team narrowed down the final trajectory of IM1 as it burst into flames on its way toward the ocean, tracking its airbursts with US Department of Defense satellite data and local seismometers set up to monitor earthquakes and volcanic activity.
With high confidence that the final path for IM1 covered 6.2 square miles (16 sq-km) of ocean near Manus Island, the team was then able to scrape the deep ocean floor with a large magnetic ‘sled’ — both along IM1’s path and several ‘control’ regions.
The control regions ensured more iron spheres had not found their way onto the ocean floor via some event unrelated to IM1’s fall to Earth.
Roughly two dozen people, including scientists with Harvard’s Galileo Project Expedition, the ship’s crew and documentary filmmakers chronicling the endeavor, set sail from the island town of Lorengau on June 14 onboard the Silver Star.
Throughout their two-week Pacific voyage, the Galileo team scoured the seabed for signs of IM1 debris, dragging a deep-sea magnetic sled along the fireball’s last known trajectory and completing 26 runs of the sea floor.
In 2021, the physicist released a book titled ‘Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,’ which argued that Oumuamu may not have been a comet or asteroid but ‘space junk’ of an alien civilization.
Oumuamua was discovered by a telescope in Hawaii, millions of miles away, and initially deemed Earth’s first interstellar visitor until 2022, when IM1 was identified.
The remnants came from a meter-size object that crashed off the coast of Papua, New Guinea in 2014, which Professor Loeb claims was an alien craft
About 700 metallic spherical objects were pulled from the sea, which Professor Loeb determined contained alloys that could only be found in interstellar space
The team was then able to scrape the deep ocean floor with a large magnetic ‘sled’ (pictured)
Professor Loeb made a name for himself after claiming Oumuamua was an alien craft. It was discovered in October 2017 by a telescope in Hawaii, millions of miles away, and initially deemed Earth’s first interstellar visitor until 2022
His fellow researchers, however, have long criticized Professor Loeb for his endeavors.
Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University, told The New York Times: ‘People are sick of hearing about Avi Loeb’s wild claims.
‘It’s polluting good science — conflating the good science we do with this ridiculous sensationalism and sucking all the oxygen out of the room.’
Professor Loeb addressed these comments in his Medium post and wished ‘these astronomers happiness and prosperity.’
‘Now that we discovered spherules with an extra-solar composition near IM1’s path, they better retract their published claim that the US Space Command overestimated IM1’s speed by a large factor and that IM1 was a stony meteorite from the solar system,’ he wrote.
‘We now know that IM1 was interstellar. Instead of rejecting the data, they would be better off revising their model.’