The interstellar object called IM1, fell to Earth thousands of years ago, specifically in the Pacific Ocean. Since 2014 Abraham ‘Avi’ Loeb, a Harvard professor has been conducting expeditions to find it. How much we have not heard that a finding could change the theories that exist about life outside the Earth, whether that means extraterrestrial life or not, but the reality, the importance of the interstellar object is because it could mean technological junk, that is extraterrestrial.
“The identification of interstellar technological debris would reveal the nature of our cosmic neighbors, even if they are no longer around because the journey of their packages outlasted their lifespan.”
Interstellar Objects Exploded in the Pacific
In 2014, an asteroid about half a meter wide entered Earth’s atmosphere and exploded off the coast of Papua, New Guinea, in the Pacific Ocean. It caused no havoc beyond a wave of theories about its origin.
According to Avi Loeb, who calculated the rock’s velocity to be “above” normal, IM1 is the first interstellar projectile to reach our planet. In the entire history of astronomy, only two objects have ever been identified as coming from beyond the solar system.
Professor ‘Avi Loeb emphasizes that this material found is much harder than the other 272 meteors recorded by NASA’s CNEOS since iron meteorites break into small pieces that are melted by the fireball into spherules that rain down and are recovered in scattered fields as almost spherical fragments.
Months of Expeditions
Since June 2023, the researcher has been on an expedition within the delimited area where the interstellar object would be. It was not an easy expedition and required considerable financial resources. “It’s like finding a needle in the sea,” warned Loeb.
His efforts have paid off. In the last few weeks, he and his team captured, with the help of a huge magnet that they immersed in the ocean, small metallic spheres and pieces of wire in the area of the explosion. The scientist shared the findings on his official blog and presented these tiny metal fragments as remnants of IM1.
A Combination of Materials
According to Avi, local tests conducted on the interstellar object’s debris indicate that it is composed of iron, magnesium, and titanium with no nickel. “This composition is anomalous compared to man-made alloys, known asteroids, and familiar astrophysical sources,” he shared.
However, his scientific counterparts have warned media outlets such as BBC that the famous millimeter-diameter spheres could literally be anything but a spacecraft fragment.
A Second Interstellar Object
According to the scientists, a second interstellar meteor, IM2, was identified in NASA’s CNEOS Fireball catalog. According to his specifications, the two interstellar meteors are one-meter-scale objects that collide with the Earth from a trajectory not gravitationally bound to the Sun. In other words, the objects arrived in the solar system from interstellar space and were moving faster than the Sun’s escape velocity when they were picked up by the ‘fishing net’ of the Earth’s atmosphere.
The first interstellar meteor, CNEOS 2014-01-08 (IM1), discovered in 2019, was confirmed with a confidence level of 99.999 percent by a letter from U.S. Space Command to NASA. The second interstellar meteor discovered CNEOS 2017-03-09 (IM2), was ten times more massive and approximately one meter in size. These meteors would be the cause of a chunk falling into Earth’s Pacific.
This story was published in Spanish by Perla Vallejo in Ecoosfera
