Harvard University’s Professor Avi Loeb and colleagues have discovered at least 50 tiny spherical iron fragments near the fireball path of the first recognized interstellar meteor, IM1.
IM1 was detected over the South Pacific, off the northern coast of Papua New Guinea, in 2014.
Also referred to as CNEOS 20140108, the meteor had an estimated mass of 460 kg and was between 80 cm and 1 m (2.6-3.3 feet) in diameter.
The object was identified as an interstellar meteor candidate in 2019, and confirmed in 2022.
“IM1’s fireball was detected by the U.S. Government at 17:05 GMT on January 8, 2014 and indicated that this meteor was speeding beyond the value required to escape from the Solar System,” said Professor Loeb, the leader of the Galileo Project, which aims to identify the nature of potential objects made by existing or extinct extraterrestrial technological civilizations.
“Based on the air ram-pressure that it sustained before disintegrating in three flares 20 km above the ocean surface, this object was tougher in material strength than all other 272 meteors in the CNEOS catalog of NASA.”
“Its interstellar origin was formally confirmed at the 99.999% confidence in an official letter from the U.S. Space Command under DoD to NASA on March 1, 2022.”
“Two years earlier, my discovery paper of IM1 with my undergraduate student Amir Siraj showed that IM1 was moving outside the Solar System faster than 95% of all stars in the vicinity of the Sun.”
“The possibility that IM1’s excess speed benefited from propulsion and the fact that it was tougher than all known space rocks, raise the possibility that it may have been technological in origin — similar to NASA’s New Horizons craft colliding with an exoplanet in a billion years and burning up in its atmosphere as an interstellar meteor.”
As part of the Galileo Project, Professor Loeb and his team aimed to retrieve the meteoritic spherules of IM1.
On 14 June, 2023, they set out for the…
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