You might have seen reports from earlier this year of a Harvard scientist, Avi Loeb, who led a team to try and recover debris from a meteor that crashed into the Pacific Ocean in 2014. What made that meteor particularly interesting was that its speed and trajectory indicated that it originated outside the solar system. Loeb was able to recover metal spheres from the ocean floor that are the remains of the meteor (think of the process of manufacturing shotgun pellets). He is now reporting that the 57 of these pellets he analyzed "contain compositions that are not known to be in our solar system."
The paper suggested that the properties formed when the Earth-like planet deviated from a circular orbit around a dwarf star, creating a stream of debris shooting into interstellar space.
Loeb wrote that during this event, a rocky planet's crust would melt, creating an abundance of beryllium, lanthanum and uranium, which were found in the metallic spheres pulled from the depths of the ocean.
While the new analysis points to a natural origin, Loeb suggested that abundant rare elements could have served a technological purpose.
'For example, lanthanum could have been melted from semiconductors, and uranium could have been used as fuel in a fission reactor,' he explained.
Loeb told DailyMail.com that he and his team 'plan to find out the true nature of IM1 by finding large pieces of it in our next expedition within the next nine months.'
Cool. Interesting Loeb isn't playing up the alien angle. I'd like to see isotopic numbers.
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