Has our interstellar neighbor sent us a package?

Top Harvard University physicist Avi Loeb is once again in the spotlight as he claims to have found the wreckage of an alien spaceship on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The discovery comes after two weeks of painstaking searching of the Pacific Ocean floor. The debris is believed to be from a 2014 meteor called IM1 that crashed off the coast of Papua, New Guinea.

With the help of a magnetic sled, his team found 50 tiny iron ball-shaped fragments that he believes came from "a natural environment different from the solar system, or an alien technological civilization".

The discovery provides strong support for Dr Loeb's claims for years that intelligent alien life exists and has been visited by them. In 2017, an interstellar object called Oumuamua (the cigar-shaped object known as "Oumuamua" or "Uumama") passed through the solar system. Most scientists believe it is a natural phenomenon. However, Dr. Loeb disagreed and argued, in his usual fashion, that the interstellar object could be of extraterrestrial origin.

After the discovery of 'Oumuamua in 2017, Professor Loeb speculated that there may be more interstellar objects whizzing past Earth. His bold and unconventional views were quickly criticized both within and outside the scientific community.

In 2019, a Harvard student proved Dr. Loeb's point again. They found that a high-speed fireball in 2014, the IM1 meteorite, also came from interstellar space, and this discovery was before Omeya. When the IM1 meteorite fell to Earth on January 8, 2014, it exploded into flames in mid-air due to air friction, leaving a trail of hot iron droplets in its path.

"Given IM1's high speed and abnormal matter intensity, its source must come from a natural environment different from the solar system, or an alien technological civilization." Dr. Loeb told Fox Digital News.

The Galileo team's latest mission began with the discovery that these interstellar metal fragments could be extracted from the Pacific Ocean using powerful magnets. About two dozen people were involved in the mission, including scientists from the Harvard University Galileo Project expedition, the crew and the documentary filmmakers documenting the adventure. They embarked on the voyage on June 14 on the "Silver Star" from the island town of Lorema.

During the two-week Pacific voyage, the Galileo team scoured the seafloor for the remains of fragments of IM1, dragging a deep-sea magnetic sled along the fireball's last known trajectory.

Dr. Loeb, who reported the discovery to Fox Digital News, explained: "We found ten small balls. These are almost perfect spheres or metal marbles. When you look at them through a microscope, they look different from the background. Very different. They come in golds, blues, browns, and some of them are like miniature Earth.”

"Its material strength is tougher than any space rock NASA has ever seen and documented before. We calculated its speed outside the solar system. Its speed is 60 kilometers per second, faster than 95% of the stars near the sun. The fact that it's made of harder material than iron meteorites and is moving faster than 95 percent of the stars near our sun suggests it could be a spacecraft or some kind of technological contraption from another civilization."

Preliminary compositional analysis indicated that the pellets consisted of 84% iron, 8% silicon, 4% magnesium and 2% titanium, as well as trace elements. Their size is very small, only submillimeter in size. The crew found 50 in total. The composition of the globules -- 84 percent iron -- came as a slap in the face to astrophysicists at the Earth and Space Exploration Institute in Canada, who thought their pre-impact computer simulations of IM1 proved it wasn't made of iron. composed of quality.

While they will be brought back to the lab for more detailed examination, the team believes the discovery is just the tip of the iceberg, as continued research on these objects will unlock more questions than answers.

"We want to find a chunk of the object that survived the impact, because then we can tell if it's a rock or a piece of technology," Dr Loeb said.

If it turns out that the object is a rock, Earth science will thus expand its horizons. On the other hand, if the spheres are found to be technological, the scientific community may need shock absorbers to deliver the shock. Of course, this will depend on the results of Dr. Avi Loeb's lab tests.

(Compilation: Chen Bingxuan)

(Editor in charge: Jiang Qiming)

(Source of the article: New Sancai first release)