After a Harvard professor claimed that he may have discovered pieces of alien technology from a meteor that fell in the waters off of Papua New Guinea in 2014, aliens have made headlines once again across the US.
The enigmatic materials were recently brought back to Harvard for examination by Harvard science professor Avi Loeb and his team. The US Space Command can almost certainly (99.999%) say that it originated from another solar system.
A 10km (6.2 mile) radius of the potential landing site was provided to Loeb by the government.
"That is where the fireball took place, and the government detected it from the Department of Defence. It's a very big area, the size of Boston, so we wanted to pin it down," said Loeb. "We figured the distance of the fireball based off the time delay between the arrival of the blast wave, the boom of explosion, and the light that arrived quickly."
They were able to map the meteor's potential path using their calculations. According to those calculations, the projected 10 km range from the US government would pass directly through. The Silver Star is the vessel that Loeb and his team used to travel there.
The ship made a number of passes both along and around the planned course. The researchers used their boat to pull a sledge loaded with magnets across the ocean floor.
"We found ten spherules. These are almost perfect spheres, or metallic marbles. When you look at them through a microscope, they look very distinct from the background," explained Loeb. "They have colours of gold, blue, brown, and some of them resemble a miniature of the Earth."
The spherules' composition analysis revealed that they are primarily composed of iron (84%), silicon (8%), magnesium (4%) and titanium (2%), as well as trace elements. Their size is less than a millimetre. There were a total of 50 found by the crew.
"It has material strength that is tougher than all space rock that were seen before, and catalogued by Nasa," added Loeb. The professor stated that the speed of the object, 60 km per second, surpasses 95% of stars near the sun, suggesting it could be a spacecraft or technological gadget.
According to CBS, Loeb compares the situation to Voyager spacecrafts launched by Nasa, stating they will exit the solar system 10,000 years later. He envisions them colliding with another planet billions of years from now, appearing as a meteor.
Meanwhile, at Harvard, the investigation and analysis are still in their early stages. Loeb is attempting to determine whether the spherules are synthetic or natural.
If they are natural, it will help scientists understand what kinds of materials might be found outside of the solar system. The questions really start to arise if it is artificial.
"It will take us tens of thousands of years to exit our solar system with our current spacecraft to another star. This material spent that time arriving to us, but it's already here," smiled Loeb. "We just need to check our backyard to see if we have packages from an interstellar Amazon that takes billions of years for the travel," he added.
Furthermore, Loeb is investigating debris and unwatched footage from their sled, believing spherules could be small breadcrumbs for a bigger find. He hopes to find a large meteor piece that survived the impact, determining if it's a rock or a technological gadget.