Interstellar meteor may have been discovered in the Pacific Ocean

2023-07-10 00:31:29

The fragments of IM1, considered the first interstellar meteor, may have been discovered amidst the depths of the Pacific Ocean, during an expedition carried out by Harvard researchers. The information has been published on the platform Mediumat the end of June.

According to physicist Avi Loeb, a professor at Harvard and one of the leaders of the expedition, the findings measure less than a millimeter and have a different composition than the known star on Earth. “I won’t go into detail until we finish the soil analysis, but we found compositional patterns that deviate from what has been recorded in the past,” explained Loeb.

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Loeb and his team were looking for the remains of CNEOS 2014-01-08, a meteor that fell to Earth in 2014 and had been captured by US government sensors, captured by NASA. After finding the record, the physicist concluded that the object’s impact velocity and its angle of entry suggested it could be from outside the Solar System.

Alien spheres being recovered from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean where a meteor fell in 2014. The search is being carried out by astrophysicist Avi Loeb and his team.

It is estimated that the meteor broke up into more than 10,000 of these spheres. pic.twitter.com/bKiPhMPz20

— Scientific Space (@espcientifico) June 26, 2023

According to the researchers, they found about 40 iron spheres that would be from the rock. However, other scientists are skeptical about the fragments’ origins.

Origin of the interstellar meteor is a mystery

Loeb explained that some of the most abundant elements in the samples are very rare to be found on Earth, while others are absent. This seems to be the case for nickel, an element that is usually present in up to 10% of iron meteorites.

The ratio may be unusual, but to other astronomers, it doesn’t prove that the spherules came from an interstellar object. “The allusion is that it’s not like other beads, but we don’t know that yet,” said David Jewitt of the University of California. “And actually there is wide dispersion in the abundance of nickel in the others (meteors), especially those in the ocean.”

Thus, Loeb and his team plan to take the material for spectroscopic analyses, with the aim of identifying the isotopes present in them and, according to their proportions in relation to those in other meteorites, can help reveal where the fragments came from.

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