A meteorite that landed in the waters off Papua New Guinea in 2014 might hold clues about far-off alien civilizations, according to one Harvard professor. Avi Loeb and his team just brought materials found in the crash back to the school for analysis, and the U.S. Space Command confirmed with 99.999-percent certainty that they came from another solar system.
According to CBS News, Loeb and his crew took a boat out to where the meteorite was believed to have landed nearly a decade ago. They were able to pick up unique pieces of metal off the ocean floor by attaching magnets to a sled.
"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," Loeb explained of the discovery. "They have colors of gold, blue, brown, and some of them resemble a miniature of the Earth."
Analysis showed that the spherules are composed of 84 percent iron, 8 percent silicon, 4 percent magnesium, and 2 percent titanium, plus traces of other elements. And they're not exactly real-life marble-sized either, each measuring less than a millimeter in diameter. They found 50 of these minuscule dots in total.
"It has material strength that is tougher than all space rock that were seen before, and catalogued by NASA," Loeb said. "The fact that it was made of materials tougher than even iron meteorites, and moving faster than 95 percent of all stars in the vicinity of the sun, suggested potentially it could be a spacecraft from another civilization or some technological gadget."
More research and analysis needs to be done to determine the exact origins of the curious spherical objects, including culling through hours of unwatched footage from the camera attached to the team's sled. If they're found to be natural, it will give researchers insight into what materials may exist outside of our solar system. If they turn out to be artificial, they might have bigger questions on their hands. These little spheres, then, could lead scientists on a path toward much more significant discoveries.
"They also help us pinpoint any big piece of the meteor we could find in a future expedition," Loeb noted. "We hope to find a big piece of this object that survived the impact because then we can tell if it's a rock or technological gadget."
Because it takes thousands of years for us to travel across the vast expanses of space, the professor's discover would not only be possible alien technology, but ancient alien technology at that.
"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," Loeb smiled. "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."
from Men's Journal https://ift.tt/zHhkXi0
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