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Journalism of Courage
Scientists have been searching the ocean for parts of an interstellar space rock that hit the planet in 2014. While they are yet to identify anything that is unequivocally of interstellar origin, an international team of researchers has discovered some metallic “spherules” in the Pacific Ocean on the path of the asteroid, according to Harvard astrophysicist Abraham “Avi” Loeb.
The discovery was announced by Loeb in a Medium post on Wednesday and was a result of work conducted as part of the “Galileo Project.” The goal of the project, headed by Loeb, is to search for “extraterrestrial technological signatures of Extraterrestrial Technological Civilizations (ETCs) from accidental or anecdotal observations and legends to the mainstream of transparent, validated, and systematic scientific research.”
The asteroid CNEOS 2014-01-08 crashed off the coast of Papua New Guinea on January 8, 2014. This was three years before Oumuama, the much more famous interstellar object, was discovered. Amira Siraj, a Harvard student whose advisor was Loeb, characterised the meteor as “interstellar” in 2019, according to NPR.
While Siraj wrote about the process of identifying the object as interstellar in an opinion piece for Scientific American, many scientific journals refused to publish a report on the asteroid because it made use of data from a NASA database that did not reveal some details.
But the US Space Force released a memo to NASA scientists in 2022 that the data was “sufficiently accurate to indicate an interstellar trajectory,” according to a New York Times report. But NASA disagreed with Loeb and Siraj’s claims in a statement, “confirmed the object’s high-velocity impact, but the short duration of collected data, less than five seconds, makes it difficult to definitively determine if the object’s origin was indeed interstellar.”
Sometimes, small “spherules” like the ones the researchers have claimed to discover are sometimes created when asteroids crash into the planet. The magnetic spherule they found is 0.3 millimetre, which means that finding it in the ocean makes finding a needle in the haystack a relatively simple task.
Loeb says they used XRF analysis (X-Ray fluorescence) and found that it was mostly made of iron with some magnesium and some titanium but no nickel. They also found that its compositions were “anomalous compared to human-made alloys, known asteroids, and familiar astrophysical sources,” according to the astrophysicist.
The researchers now plan to go to the crash site of the asteroid, hoping to find many more spherules. If they have a large enough sample, they can obtain a gamma-ray spectrum that will help them characterise its radioactive elements and thereby, potentially, even date the sample.
