Avi Loeb, a professor at Harvard University, believes he has found fragments of alien technology from a meteorite that fell in the waters of Papua New Guinea in 2014.
According to CBS News Boston, Loeb and his team took the found materials to Harvard for analysis.
For its part, the United States Space Command confirmed with 99.999% certainty that it is material from another solar system, while the government provided a professor with a radius of 10 km where it could have landed.
That’s where the fireball occurred, and the government picked it up from the Department of Defense. It’s a very large area, about the size of Boston, so we wanted to pin it down.
We calculated the distance of the fireball based on the time lag between the arrival of the shock wave, the burst of the explosion, and the light that arrived rapidly,” Loeb stated.
According to the information available in this regard, the calculations made by the team made it possible to trace the path of the meteor, and in turn traced a path with the same range projected by the US government.
For the trip, Loeb and his team took a boat called the Silver Star and passed over the meteorite’s projected path several times, adding a sled filled with magnets to their boat.
“We found ten spherules. These are almost perfect spheres, or metallic marbles.
When you look at them through a microscope they look very different from the background.
They have gold, blue, brown colors and some of them resemble a miniature Earth,” Loeb explained.
According to the compositional analysis, the spherules are composed of 84% iron, 8% silicon, 4% magnesium, and 2% titanium, as well as trace elements, while their size is submillimeter. In all, the crew found 50.
“It has a material strength that is harder than all the space rocks that have been seen before and cataloged by NASA. We calculate its speed outside the solar system. It was 60 km per second, faster than 95% of all the stars in the vicinity of the Sun.
The fact that it was made of materials harder than even iron meteorites, and that it moved faster than 95% of all the stars in the Solar system, suggested that it could potentially be a spacecraft from another civilization or some kind. of technology,” Loeb explained.
Both research and analysis are just beginning at Harvard, so Loeb is trying to understand whether the spherules are artificial or natural.
If they are natural, it will give researchers an idea of what material it is, and if it is artificial, “the questions will really begin.”
“It will take us tens of thousands of years to leave our solar system with our current spacecraft to another star.
This material took that long to get to us, but it’s here now, we just have to check our backyard for packets from an interstellar Amazon that takes billions of years to travel,” Loeb said.
There’s still more debris to investigate and hours of unseen footage from the camera attached to his sled.
Loeb thinks there’s a chance the spherules could be little breadcrumbs for a bigger find.
“They also help us identify any large pieces of the meteorite that we might find on a future expedition.
We hope to find a large piece of this object that survived the impact because then we can know if it is a rock or technology,” said the professor.