Harvard professor Avi Loeb’s search for remains of interstellar object that crashed into ocean concludes — here’s what was found

A Harvard University physics professor just concluded a two-week project dredging the depths of the Pacific Ocean in search of the remains of the first confirmed interstellar object to fall to Earth — an object he hypothesized could be a form of extraterrestrial technology.

Professor Avi Leob — famous for his 2017 stance that the bizarre interstellar object ʻOumuamua could be an extraterrestrial object passing Earth — announced that his research team wrapped up their $1.5 million expedition called the “Galileo Project” on Tuesday, and that they’d collected 35 milligrams of promising material.

Those findings consisted of 50 spherules — small spheres of material mere millimeters in diameter that are characteristically shed from meteorites as they enter and burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.

The team collected the spherules by dragging a large magnetic sled across the ocean floor off the coast of Papa New Guinea.

“As molten droplets from a fireball, they carry information about the elemental and isotopic composition of the first recognized interstellar meteor,” Leob wrote on Tuesday in a his ongoing Medium blog about the project.

Leob and his crew were in search of the remains of CNEOS 2014-01-08, a meteor that fell to Earth in 2014 and was picked up by United States government sensors and logged by NASA.

After coming across the record, Leob concluded the object’s impact velocity and its unusual entry angle suggested it could be from a solar system outside of our own.

He was also piqued by the fact that the object didn’t fall apart until it reached Earth’s lower atmosphere, suggesting it was made of something substantially stronger than most anything ever recorded.

When Leob published a paper suggesting there was a 99.999% chance the object was interstellar, the US Space Command and the Department of Defense agreed with the findings and it was renamed IM1. The designation meant the arrival of IM1 predated ʻOumuamua — previously considered the first observed interstellar object to enter the solar system — by three years.

Leob hypothesized that IM1’s unique characteristics and its interstellar origins opened the possibility that it was a piece of extraterrestrial technology, something which couldn’t be determined unless the remains were collected and studied.

“Given IM1’s high speed and anomalous material strength, its source must have been a natural environment different from the solar system, or an extraterrestrial technological civilization,” Leob wrote in his blog.

With the help of the US military, Leob and his team determined where IM1 likely fell to an area less than a square mile. The team then travelled to the location off Papa New Guinea on June 14 and began dragging their magnetic deep sea sled repeatedly across the ocean floor.

During the search they turned up a number of metallic wire-like fragments and shards of metal with unusual properties and origins that remain inconclusive without further study.

But most promising of all were the 50 spherules they collected over the last seven days of the expedition. Many of those fragments were composed of magnesium, titanium, and iron — a highly unusual combination of elements for Earthen and local celestial objects that Leob hopes may be the kind of unambiguous indicator they came from IM1.

“The spherules were found primarily along the most likely path of IM1 and not in control regions far from it,” Leob wrote on his blog. “In the coming weeks we will analyze their elemental and isotopic composition and report our data in a paper submitted to a peer-reviewed journal.”

“In response to the nay-sayers we say nothing other than show our data in our first publication. One cannot argue with facts, only with interpretations.”

Leob wrote that the knowledge from the expedition would help future voyages under the Galileo Project search with even more precision, and hopefully turn up even greater artifacts.

“Finding a large relic of IM1 on the ocean floor based on the spatial distribution of spherules in our 26 runs through the 10 kilometers region around IM1’s fireball will be our common goal for the coming year,” he wrote.

Before the expedition embarked, Leob told the Daily Beast that they may not find anything at all, and that if they do it might not necessarily be of extraterrestrial origin.

“There is a chance it will fail,” he said, but noted but noted that even if if any discovered remains turn out to be of natural origin they would constitute a groundbreaking scientific discovery.

“We will learn something new.”