CAMBRIDGE — A Harvard University professor believes he may have found fragments of alien technology from a meteorite that slammed into the waters off Papua New Guinea in 2014.
Avi Loeb and his team sent the material back to Harvard for analysis. US Space Command can say with almost certainty, 99,999%, that it came from another solar system. The US government gave Loeb a 10 km radius of where he might have landed.
“That’s where the fireball happened,” said Loeb, “and the government detected it from the Department of Defense. It’s a very large area about the size of Boston, so we wanted to pin it down. We worked out the distance of the fireball. It’s based on the time delay between the arrival of the blast wave and the sound of the blast and the light that arrived.” quickly “.
Their calculations allowed them to plot a possible trajectory for the meteors. These calculations happened to carve a path through the expected 10km range that came from the US government. Loeb and his crew take a boat called the Silver Star. The ship took many passes along and around the projected course. The researchers combed the ocean floor by attaching a magnet-filled sled to their boat.
“We found ten globules. These are almost perfect spheres, or metallic spheres of metal. When you look at them through a microscope, they look very different from the background,” Loeb explained, “and they have colors of gold, blue, brown and some of the color they look like in miniature.” to the earth.”
Composition analysis showed that the pellets are made of 84% iron, 8% silicon, 4% magnesium and 2% titanium, in addition to trace elements. Its size is less than a millimeter. The crew found 50 of them in all.
Loeb added, “It has a material force stronger than all space rocks seen before, cataloged by NASA. We calculated its speed outside the solar system. It was 60 km per second, faster than 95% of all stars near the Sun. And the fact that it is made of Material more powerful than iron meteorites, and moving faster than 95% of all stars near the sun, indicates that it is likely a spacecraft from another civilization, or some technological tool.”
It’s like the situation with any of NASA’s Voyager spacecraft.
“They’ll be out of the solar system in 10,000 years,” Loeb explained. “Just imagine them colliding with another planet a billion years from now. They’ll emerge as a meteor from a combination moving faster than usual.”
Research and analysis has just begun at Harvard. Loeb is trying to understand whether the pellets are artificial or natural. If it is natural, it will give researchers insight into what materials might exist outside our solar system. If it’s artificial, then the questions really begin.
“It will take us tens of thousands of years to get out of our solar system with our current spacecraft to another star. This material has spent that time getting to us, but it’s already there,” Loeb smiled, “we just need to check out our backyard in order to see what’s going on.” If we had packets of interstellar Amazons that would take billions of years to travel.”
He still has more wreckage to search, and hours of unwatched footage from a camera strapped to the sled. He thinks there’s a chance the pellets are small breadcrumbs for a larger discovery.
“It also helps us identify any large piece of the meteorite that we could find on a future expedition,” Loeb details, “we hope to find a large piece of this object that survived the impact because then we can tell if it’s a rock or a technical tool.” .”
