The UFO hunter from Harvard University believes that he and his team may have recovered tiny fragments of an interstellar visitor at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, but there are still many reasons for skepticism. We are all the Titan.
According to a report by the BBC, the tireless astronomer from Harvard, Avi Loeb, has found what he believes could be fragments of an alien meteor using his “interstellar hook,” a tentacle-shaped device he invented that scrapes the ocean floor to collect possible samples of interstellar rocks.
Loeb has made a name for himself in his search for artifacts that could belong to an extraterrestrial civilization. Although he may be more famous for his theories surrounding the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua, which flew past Earth in October 2017, the latest anomaly in question, nicknamed IM1, fell into the Pacific Ocean in 2014.
A meteor that arrived from outside our Solar System
Loeb firmly believes that it originated from outside our Solar System due to the incredible speed at which it crashed into our seas, a location later confirmed by the Department of Defense.
And that’s not all. Loeb argues that the meteorite could represent alien civilization’s technology, an unlikely theory that will not leave his colleagues indifferent.
But did he and his team actually find evidence of the interstellar origins of the object, or were they simply searching through the remains at the bottom of the ocean?
Earlier this month, Loeb and his team set sail aboard a ship serendipitously named the Silver Star to take a ride with their interstellar hook. On June 21, they seemed to hit the mark when they found small spherical fragments called “spherules,” composed of a peculiar mixture of iron, magnesium, and titanium.
Although Loeb appears confident that these tiny fragments, measuring just one-third of a millimeter in size, come from IM1, other scientists remain skeptical and point out that spherules can also be created by terrestrial processes.
“Marc Fries, a NASA cosmic dust curator, explained to the BBC that tiny metallic spherules are very common on Earth. ‘They come from car exhaust pipes, vehicle brakes, welding, volcanoes, and probably some other sources we haven’t identified.'”
Not to mention that they could have been fragments from the hundreds of other meteorites that rain down on us every year.
But that hasn’t perturbed Loeb, who has since insisted on his blog that the “anomalous” composition of the spherules makes them a good candidate for having interstellar origins, though he acknowledges that further investigation is needed to determine what makes them so special.
And who knows? There still exists a minuscule possibility that they have arrived here from a completely different star system.
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