Not From This Solar System

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...

Alien Fragments

In 2014, an interstellar object – thought to be from another star system – streaked across Earth’s skies as a meteor, then crashed into the Pacific Ocean near Papua New Guinea. 

Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb is now leading a sea-going search, combing the ocean floor with what’s essentially a large magnet, hoping to pick up fragments of that object. He’s found bits of wire, tiny aluminum shards and volcanic ash. 

And this week (June 21, 2023), Loeb reported that his team has found tiny metallic spherules whose composition suggests an unearthly origin.

Loeb posted the news in his onboard diary, which is published at Medium. He included a photo of a few of the odd objects, which are minuscule, only about 0.3 mm (about one-hundredth of an inch) in size. And he added a couple of more photos in his latest post on June 22.

Becky Ferreira also wrote about the discovery for Vice on the same day.

Loeb likens the search to “finding a needle in the ocean.”   READ MORE...