Five years after making headlines with the hypothesis of a space probe crossing the solar system in 2017, American astrophysicist Avi Loeb has recovered metallic debris in the Pacific that he may attribute to an alien probe.
Has an American researcher, former head of the astronomy department at Harvard, discovered metallic elements from a planetary system other than ours in the depths of the Pacific? Objects outside the solar system.
In 2014 an asteroid fell
Avraham Loeb shocked the world of astrophysics in 2018, a year after discovering a celestial object called 1I/Oumuamua that was shown to transit the solar system from outside before leaving it. Scientists were lost in guesses about its nature, but the American confirmed that it could be an alien ship, whose speed was nevertheless measured at about 300,000 kilometers per hour. His colleagues, who today are more inclined towards a comet, didn’t really follow him.
Five years later, the ex-professor from Boston appears controversially in the news again. Last June, using a kind of sled, he “raked” the seabed 80 km from the coast of Papua New Guinea and 1,700 meters deep over an area of 10 km2, identifying the one on which there was a celestial object called CNEOS 2014-01-08 would have completed his course in 2014. A speedster that may come from outside our planetary system, or so he thinks.
Microspheres rich in uranium, beryllium and lanthanum
In this operation, Avi Loeb’s team extracted 700 small spheres, barely half a millimeter in diameter, rich in uranium, beryllium and lanthanum. For some, at dimensions thousands of times greater than what has been observed with other meteorites. “The alloys found are certainly unprecedented in our solar system,” he says without the slightest doubt.
“This is the first time that people have gotten their hands on materials from a large object that arrived on Earth from outside our solar system,” assures Avraham Loeb. “It’s historic.”
An alien probe that exploded?
The scientist hypothesizes that an interstellar probe in the Pacific launched by an alien civilization would have been damaged after exploding upon contact with Earth’s atmosphere. “On the next mission we will search for larger debris. Then we can quickly determine whether it is a piece of rock or a technical device,” reports the newspaper L’Echo in an article dedicated to him.
The idea that this object came from interstellar space is now controversial. And the conclusions of the scientist, whose reputation and competence cannot be ignored, are received by his colleagues with extreme caution.