Study: Materials in the ocean are not from this solar system

A sprinkling of tiny beads found off the coast of Papua New Guinea may have come from a rock with a rather interesting history, having traveled light years of space from its origin around a star that is not our sun.

while Conclusions It has not been properly reviewed yet, it has already been reviewed Stimulate discussion In the scientific community, researchers warn against reading too deeply into the analysis.

The meteorite was tracked by US government satellites before it disintegrated over the Pacific Ocean in 2014. The unusual velocity of the meteor shower, cataloged as CNEOS 2014-01-08 (or simply IM1), has attracted attention as a potential rocket from afar.

It was too good an opportunity not to be missed for the famous Harvard astronomer, Avi Loeb, who founded Project Galileo in 2021 for space research. Search for signatures Technology of extraterrestrial origin. Last June, he led an expedition to search for the remains of IM1.

Using an array of powerful rare earth magnets, members of the project’s research team sifted hundreds of tiny globules 0.05 to 1.3 millimeters in diameter from sediment two kilometers (1.2 miles) below the surface, about 85 kilometers north of Manus Island.

An initial assessment of 57 metallic objects by a team of researchers from Harvard University in the US indicates that at least a few of them do not reflect the kind of chemistry we would expect from our solar system, prompting speculation that IM1 crossed interstellar space before hitting our planet’s atmosphere.

“This is a landmark discovery, marking the first time humans have preserved material from a large interstellar body, and I am very pleased with the results from this rigorous scientific analysis.” He says American businessman Charles Hoskinson, who helped fund the expedition to search for meteorite remains.

This analysis involved finding out the proportion of elements that make up a selection of the beads, which were supposed to have been cast from the surfaces of the meteorite fragments as they fell through the atmosphere prior to their fall.

Differences in iron isotopes were found to be consistent with a traumatic entry through our atmosphere, supporting the hypothesis that the globules are not terrestrial in origin.

Being rich in the minerals beryllium (Be), lanthanum (La) and uranium (U), the particles also look nothing like the kinds of materials we find in our planetary neighborhood. In fact, this ratio has never been seen before in a meteorite, indicating a rarity that indicates a place of birth far outside our solar system.

The analysis contributes to a growing field of study on the exchange of rocky material between stars. In theory, objects orbiting one star could be ejected with enough force to send them into the orbit of another star on a fairly regular basis.

However, in cosmological terms, the word “regular” could still make it a rare catch for human observation. We only confirmed our first local interstellar exchange in 2017, when the strange behavior of an asteroid called ‘Oumuamua caught our attention.

Finding the remains of such a visitor on Earth’s surface would be a big hit for astronomers. So the issue of the origins of any sample should be somewhat watertight extends well beyond the initial chemical sniff test.

And as with any landmark discovery, the findings attract great scrutiny, with expert opinions ranging from reserved to emphatically skeptical.

With Project Galileo’s goal of tracking not only materials of extrasolar origin, but also signs of space technology, the conversation is It’s bound to be polarizingattract a Critical Sect And optimistic opinions from various academic circles and beyond.

The same paper raises the possibility that the high uranium content may itself be an indicator of the presence of some kind of alien technology. Many in the research community will have more conservative interpretations, at least until more is known about what we’re dealing with here.

To complicate matters, the expedition itself has drawn criticism from Papua New Guinea authorities, who claim that team members may have entered the country illegally on board the ship. Wrong type of visa.

Dramatic as it may sound, science evolved as a practice of sifting useful ideas from the sediments of politics, personal beliefs, and fanciful assumptions.

We’ll need to wait a little longer to say with confidence that this sand actually bled from a rock that once basked in the warmth of another star. For now, we can only imagine the story this movie has to tell.

This research is currently available on arXiv.org Pending peer review.