On January 8, 2014, three years before the passage of Oumuamua, considered until now the first interstellar object detected by man, the sensors of the United States Department of Defense detected 'something' penetrating at full speed into the Earth's atmosphere and later crashing into the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Papua New Guinea. The data related to that event, however, was classified by the North American government, since it came from a strategic defense system, the same one that allows the United States to identify the launch of missiles anywhere in the world. But Avi Loeb, the famous astrophysicist at Harvard University, the object, classified as IM1 and no more than a meter in diameter, had already caught his attention. For several reasons. Firstly, it had entered the atmosphere at a speed of 45 km/s, much faster than any known space rock, and secondly, it did not disintegrate at high altitudes as space rocks usually do due to friction with the atmosphere. air (which raises the temperature to more than 2,000 degrees) but managed to 'go down' until it was just 17 km above the Pacific, where it finally exploded, spreading its remains over an area more than 10 km long. Standard Related News Yes Avi Loeb, the Harvard astrophysicist who believes in extraterrestrials: "We are not prepared for contact with aliens" José Manuel Nieves He is the Harvard scientist who since 2017 has been committed to investigating the possibility that Oumuamua, the first interstellar object that crossed the Solar System, was part of an ancient alien ship. And now he has done it again with some remains found in the sea that he thinks have the same extraterrestrial origin Classified data Loeb asked the North American government to provide him with the precise data of the object, but he was unable to do so. However, on March 2, 2022, just over a year ago, NASA received a formal letter from the United States Space Command, signed by Lieutenant General and Commander in Chief John E. Shaw, confirming, with a confidence 99.999%, that IM1 had indeed followed 'an interstellar trajectory'. It was thus officially confirmed that the first interstellar object detected by man had not been Oumuamua, which passed without stopping through our planetary system in 2017, but IM1, whose arrival occurred three years earlier. With these data, Avi Loeb published an article in November 2022 proposing his ideas about the mysterious object: it was clear that IM1 did not come from our own Solar System, but rather came from much further away, from other stars. But not only that, but its unusual resistance to combustion could be due to the fact that it was not a simple rock, but a metallic object that could well have been artificial. Recovering the remains There was also another fundamental difference with Oumuamua: the remains of IM1 were here, on our own planet, within reach of anyone who dared to go looking for them. If they were located, science would have in its hands, for the first time, materials forged in other stars. And, who knows, maybe even remains of a ship or probe built by a remote extraterrestrial intelligence. The temptation was too strong and, not without receiving numerous criticisms, Avi Loeb set up a scientific expedition to search for the remains of IM1 in the Pacific Ocean. And he did so by requesting private financial aid, that is, without touching a single cent of the official budgets that the University receives. Aboard the 'Silver Star' Loeb directed the work between June 14 and 28. In an interview with ABC on August 19, Loeb stated that "it is our duty to find out the nature of IM1, because the object seemed anomalous in relation to the rest of the space rocks and could have a technological origin." The team studies the remains found at the bottom of the sea A. Loeb Mysterious spheres During their expedition, Loeb and his team managed to recover from the ocean, more than 2 km deep, nearly 700 millimetric spheres with a metallic appearance that remained attached to a a kind of 'magnetic rake' with which they systematically swept the 10 km of bottom in which the remains of IM1 had been scattered. Now, together with his new book 'Interstellar', which has just been published in the United States and in which he narrates the expedition in detail, Loeb has just made public the first analysis of the spherules, five of which contain a proportion of elements (especially an alloy of uranium, nickel and lanthanum) completely unknown in the Solar System. Which also gives rise to their hypothesis that it could be an artificial object. The study will soon be published in 'The Astrophysical Journal', the same scientific journal in which the astrophysicist already published his two previous works on IM1 (here and here). But Loeb himself insists that more studies are needed to confirm the idea. A different object «Wonderful news! – writes Avi Loeb in the blog that has served as his travel diary during the expedition. For the first time in history, scientists analyzed materials from a meter-sized object that originated outside the solar system. The object lit up the sky over the Pacific Ocean almost a decade ago and its bright fireball was tracked by US government satellites. The scientific team, Loeb continues, "has just completed the initial analysis of 57 spherules (out of a total of almost 700) from the crash site of the first recognized interstellar meteor, IM1." «The light curve of the fireball – continues Loeb – showed three flares, separated by a tenth of a second from each other. Before entering the solar system, IM1 was moving at a speed of 60 kilometers per second relative to the local standard of the rest of the Milky Way, faster than 95% of all stars near the Sun. Considering that it maintained its integrity at an impact speed on Earth of 45 kilometers per second to a height of 17 kilometers above the Pacific Ocean, the resistance of its material must have been harder than the 272 space rocks documented by NASA in the CNEOS meteorite catalog , including the 5% minority of them that are iron meteorites. A.Loeb Soon, the last word Loeb explains that the spherules are being analyzed "with the best instruments in the world in four laboratories at Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley, the Bruker Corporation and the Papua New University of Technology Guinea". The results will shed more light on the true nature of IM1. The scientist, for his part, believes that now that we have the necessary technology, more interstellar objects like IM1 will be found, which surely number in the millions within our Solar System. And some of them, he maintains, "could well be pieces of technological space junk from other civilizations." Regarding the numerous criticisms he receives from a good part of the scientific community, who call him sensationalist and not very rigorous, Loeb told ABC in the interview on August 19 that "space rock experts insist that everything What is in the sky must be stone. I call that 'the stone age of science'. The only way to obtain new scientific knowledge is to have an open mind to that new knowledge, which will first manifest itself as anomalies. And indeed, Oumuamua and IM1 are anomalous, because they do not look like the space rocks we are familiar with.
