A sprinkling of tiny beads recovered off the coast of Papua New Guinea might have come from a rock with a rather interesting history, having crossed light years of space from its origin around a star that's not our Sun.
While the conclusions are yet to be appropriately reviewed, they're already provoking debate in the scientific community as researchers caution against reading too deeply into the analysis.
The meteor was traced by US government satellites before disintegrating over the Pacific in 2014. The unusual velocity of the bolide meteor, classified CNEOS 2014-01-08 (or more simply, IM1), attracted interest as a potential missile from afar.
It was an opportunity too good to miss for renowned Harvard University astronomer Avi Loeb, who founded the Galileo Project in 2021 to search for signatures of technology of extraterrestrial origin. This June, he led an expedition to search for remains of IM1.
Using an array of powerful rare-earth magnets, members of the project's search team sifted hundreds of tiny spherules 0.05 to 1.3 millimeters in diameter out of sediment 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) below the surface, around 85 kilometers north of Manus Island.
A preliminary evaluation of 57 of the mineral objects by a team of researchers from Harvard University in the US suggests at least a few of them don't reflect the kind of chemistry we'd expect of our own Solar System, fueling speculation that IM1 crossed interstellar space before slamming into our planet's atmosphere. READ MORE...
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