Far from stopping, and despite criticism from the scientific community, the search for extraterrestrial civilizations by Harvard physicist Avi Loeb is only intensifying. After claiming that ‘Oumuamua, the first interstellar object captured by human technology, was actually a stranded alien spacecraft, Loeb has just returned from an expedition to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to find the remains of a mysterious meteorite, named IM1. There he claims to have found 50 small “cosmic globules” which he claims correspond to the remnants of an extraterrestrial craft from outside the solar system.
It all began in 2019, when the Harvard physicist, who headed Harvard’s astronomy department from 2011 to 2020 and currently directs the Galileo project at the same university, was stunned by one of the records from the Center for Near Object Studies. (CNEOS) from NASA. In January 2014, the US Department of Defense observed a meteorite entering Earth’s atmosphere and eventually exploding over the South Pacific Ocean near Papua New Guinea. It was christened CNEOS 20140108 or IM1. This object attracted Loeb’s attention because it traveled very quickly and, moreover, exploded at a much smaller distance than most meteors. “The object was harder than all the other space rocks recorded in the same NASA catalog, and it was beyond the resistance of the material,” he explained to The Independent.
He and his Harvard colleague Amir Siraj (an astrophysicist with whom he signed other papers, including many references to Oumuamua as an extraterrestrial body), calculated with 99.999 percent confidence that IM1 had traveled to Earth from another star. The results were published in a 2022 article in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
His interest in IM1 didn’t end there. Using a combination of Department of Defense data and seismic readings, Loeb calculated an approximate area where the meteorite debris fell. In parallel, he obtained from the hands of the American magnate Charles Hoskinson funding in the amount of 1.5 million dollars to pay for an expedition to save the aforementioned materials.
A week into the search, the team found “tiny metal beads” about half a millimeter in diameter. Taking a closer look, the team determined they were most likely an alloy of steel and titanium, also known as S5 or impact steel. The resistance of S5 steel is much higher than that of iron meteorites, so it could come from there, they suggest, from its synthetic origin.
Voices disagreeing with Loeb’s arguments were not long in coming. In an expanded article posted on the portal Conversation Written by The Open University Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences, Monica Grady, many of the reasons the Harvard physicist call into question. For example, it was already possible to find “cosmic spheres” like those found by Loeb’s team on other expeditions, although it was difficult to pinpoint them, since these objects would have been contaminated after they reached Earth.
“Space droplets are spherical because they solidify from molten material ripped from the surface of meteorites as they pass through the atmosphere,” notes Grady. Expeditions throughout the 20th century found cosmic spheres on the ocean floor, but it became more and more difficult to identify them (…) Without a real analysis of the composition of the spheres and compared to analyzes of meteorites (and common terrestrial pollutants), none of them can be identified as extraterrestrial. he points out.
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