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The underwater search for an alien meteor

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 By Zaria Gorvett  27th June 2023

The relics of the first interstellar meteor are thought to lie at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
Last week one controversial scientist and his team claimed to have found them.

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eep beneath the support global
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in an inky journalism.
abyss roughly a mile (1.6km)

D
underwater, a curious
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BBC account. beast is stirring up mud. With a spotted
metallic body and wriggling umbilical of purple rope, to the region's own
eccentric deep-sea fauna it might resemble a kind of rectangular stingray. This
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is the world's first "interstellar hook" – a unique contraption designed and deployed by the
 controversial Harvard physicist Avi Loeb. It is on the hunt for alien material – and it may
have found something.  

Rewind four years, and Loeb was thinking about another strange object: the cigar-shaped
comet Oumuamua, which silently slipped past our planet in October 2017, only to
disappear forever into the void of space. This was Earth's first known interstellar visitor – a
rogue voyager that may have travelled for some 600,000 years to reach our little blue
marble. Loeb's quest to understand it earned him a new nickname – "The alien hunter of
Harvard" – a bestselling book, and no small degree of criticism from fellow scientists.  

With this comet in mind, Loeb decided to search for other cosmic anomalies. And this is
what led him, via a team of university students and a handy online catalogue of fireballs
detected around Earth, to "IM1" – a weird meteorite that exploded over the Pacific Ocean at
3.05am local time on 9 January 2014.  

Now Loeb thinks he has found some remnants of this celestial interloper. Could these rare
fragments, each around a third of a millimetre across, be debris from a distant Solar
System? Has he really managed to sift them out from the vastness of the Pacific? And just
why is the search so provocative? 

A stark reminder 

It's a startling fact that no human has ever personally encountered material from outside
our Solar System – at least, not knowingly.  

Despite 66 years of space exploration and hundreds of missions collecting samples from the
moon, solar wind, asteroids and low-earth orbit – as well as the more than 70,000
meteorites that have been found on the surface of our planet – the space debris scattered
across the world's museums is all from our own cosmic neighbourhood.  

Even the dinosaur-killing imposter that slammed into the Earth 66 million years ago is
thought to have come from the Oort cloud, a mass of comets at the farthest edge of our
Solar System which regularly throws rocks our way. (Learn more from BBC Future about the
mysteries of the Oort cloud.) 

"The planetary science community has gathered an amazing body of knowledge about these
objects, but we have never been able to study material from another Solar System – the
planets and asteroids found around a distant star," says Marc Fries, cosmic dust curator at
Nasa. "We know those systems exist, but have never been able to study them in the
laboratory." 

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 Loeb's team are continuing to search for more possible interstellar relics along the most likely
path of IM1's explosion (Credit: Abraham Loeb)

Everything we know about the space beyond our own patch comes from observing the light
that has made it at least 40 trillion km (25 trillion miles) – the distance from the next
nearest Solar System, Alpha Centuri – to our planet. The rest is a series of educated guesses,
based on the chemistry and physics of our own neighbourhood. We can only imagine the
exotic compounds these remote territories contain. At least, for the moment.  

A rare event 

At first, IM1 was just a handful of numbers in an online database, under the label "CNEOS
2014-01-08".  

Though space is constantly under watch from the roughly 10,000 professional astronomers
that inhabit the Earth, together with thousands more amateur enthusiasts, meteorites are
easily missed. The sky is simply too big to be monitored in its entirety, all of the time – and
most telescopes aren't sensitive enough to detect small objects.  

So, when IM1 slammed into the Earth, no one noticed. The only record of its existence came
from the US government, whose sensors recorded its trajectory, speed and altitude as it
streaked through the atmosphere over the Atlantic Ocean near Portugal. Any further
details, if they exist, are found in classified documents – not because it was a UFO, but
because making them public would reveal too much about the capabilities of the military
equipment that found it.  

But there were enough crucial details in the database to pique Loeb's interest. For a start,
IM1 was hurtling along at an uncanny speed.  
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All the stars in the Milky Way are moving – gradually orbiting its centre, though in the case
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of our Sun a single revolution free
takeBBC account.
about 230 million years. As they travel, they take the
contents of their Solar Systems with them. This means that any object that entered our
solar neighbourhood would already be bringing
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or Sign speed set by its own star. As it got
 closer to the Sun's gravitational pull it would "fall" towards it, increasing its pace yet further.
As a result, scientists expect that interstellar meteorites would be moving faster than
regular ones. 

Loeb's analysis suggests that not only was IM1 moving more rapidly than our own Solar
System, it was also travelling faster than 95% of the stars nearby. This, he believes, suggests
that it was interstellar. However, even factoring this in, it's not clear how it achieved such
momentum.   

Secondly, the meteorite was extremely tough – instead of breaking up in the Earth's upper
atmosphere, IM1 held on until it reached the lower atmosphere. Exactly what it was made of
remains a mystery – but it was more robust than steel.  

"We found that its material strength must be at least a few times bigger than all other space
rocks, 272 of them [at the time] in the same catalogue," said Loeb, in an interview with the
BBC a couple of weeks before the expedition started.  

Together with a colleague from Harvard, Loeb calculated with 99.999% confidence that IM1
was an interstellar visitor. This would have made it only the third ever discovered, after the
comet 2I/Borisov, which was discovered in August 2019, and Oumuamua – only this time, it
had ended up within reach. But there was a catch.  

When the team wrote up their findings, the paper was initially rejected for publication in a
scientific journal, partly because the experts reviewing it felt they needed more detail. In
need of urgent access to classified documents, Loeb's mission stalled.  

The alien comet Oumuamua came with its own mysteries, including why it accelerated as it tore
away from the Sun (Credit: Getty Images)

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Then, after years of petitioning the White House for further information, earlier this year
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Nasa received a letter. Signed by the US Space Force Lieutenant General, with a blue seal
from the Department of Defense, it confirmed that they had checked Loeb's workings with
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 the chief scientist at the US Space Operations Command, and confirmed they were
"sufficiently accurate" to suggest the mystery meteor came from interstellar space.  

"That was really unusual because the Department of Defense came to my defence, so to
speak," said Loeb.  

Some Nasa scientists remain unconvinced.  

"The study of astromaterials has revolutionised our understanding of the history of our own
Solar System, and if we could make the same studies of astromaterials from another… then
we would start down the road towards a similar level of understanding of that distant
system," says Fries. However, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence – and he
advises caution.  

"At present, it is not clearly demonstrated that this body is interstellar in origin and in fact
an expert in meteoroids made a presentation earlier this week at the Asteroids, Comets, and
Meteors 2023 conference showing that the best explanation for 'IM1' may be a fairly
common, rocky meteoroid from within our own Solar System," says Fries.  

Fries also explains that it's important to consider where the data about IM1's trajectory
came from – probably a suite of sensors built to watch for nuclear explosions. These would
not be designed to make high-accuracy measurements of meteor velocities, he notes. And
because the details remain hidden, he says it's impossible to rigorously peer-review the
data.  

Two other scientists contacted by the BBC refused to comment as they did not wish to be
associated with Loeb's claims.  

But if IM1 really did have the features Loeb has uncovered, it raises a number of questions –
none of which yet have established answers. What could it possibly have been made of? And
how did it end up travelling so fast?  

Explanations range from the relatively sober – such as the idea it originated within a distant
supernova, the explosion of a massive star – to the arguably absurd. Loeb has dared to
propose that the meteor could represent technology from an alien civilisation. And this
speculation garners even less support.  

David Spergel, emeritus professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University, who is

currently chairing Nasa’s independent study on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs),
agrees that IM1 was an intriguing object – though he says this doesn't mean it was made by
intelligent extraterrestrials.   

"It will tell us something about how planet formation proceeds," says Spergel, who does,
however, believe that it is most likely a rock from outside our own Solar System. "So, you
know, I think this is an example of an interesting study and that Avi was motivated to study
a region of parameter space that people hadn't looked at. I don't see any reason to think
that this represents an alien technology, as opposed to, you know, an asteroid that hit the
Earth," he says. 
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 The interstellar hook is designed to slide along the seafloor, fishing out any magnetic particles in
its path (Credit: Abraham Loeb)

A daring search 

Loeb's meteor search team arrived onboard the Silver Star on 14 June, and soon arrived at a
patch of velvety-blue ocean around 84km (52 miles) from the tropical shores of Manus
Island, Papua New Guinea. This is where, using a combination of US military data and local
seismology readings, Loeb calculates the debris from the meteorite will have landed.  

Armed with their "interstellar hook" and more than $1m (£786,000) in backing from the
founder of the blockchain company Cardano, the team began the journey by collecting
control samples from outside their search area, which is being used for comparison with
debris from IM1. The hook is designed like an underwater sled and is towed behind the ship
from a long rope. It can either pick up samples of potential meteor debris using the spots on
its surface, which are powerful magnets, or with less discerning collection nets.  

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This is crucial, because what Loeb and his team have been hoping for – other than a large
chunk of debris – are spherules. These tiny spheres of metal or glass, often roughly 1mm
across, are formed in the incandescent blaze as meteorites or asteroids explode, and have
been found at impact sites all over the world.  

JoinLast
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BBC scientists at Tanis, a fossil site in North Dakota where it's thought many dinosaurs
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and other animals were entombed on the day of the fateful era-ending asteroid strike,
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clues inside fossilised fish. The spherules were
still in the creatures' gills, where they were breathed in 66 million years ago. 
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 Though almost a decade has passed since debris from the meteor rained down over the
Pacific Ocean, Loeb is confident that at least some of these spherules will still be lurking
close to the surface of the seabed. And if IM1 contained a magnetic material such as iron –
which is commonly found in meteorites – the plan was that some of these tiny particles
might be picked up. 

Loeb and his team now have 25 spherules that they suspect came from IM1 (Credit: Abraham
Loeb)

A handful of hints 

To begin with, the team found a jumble of miscellaneous ocean debris – a combination of
natural materials and rubbish from millennia of trade and war. (Read more from BBC Future
about the history hidden in the world's oceans). They found wires, mysterious scapings of
metal, and even tiny spheres of material – but after further investigation, each turned out to
have biological or man-made origins. The team tweaked the search area, and considered
switching to the non-magnetic collection method: perhaps the meteor wasn't made from
metal after all? 

Then on 21 June, they finally had some luck. As Loeb reported in his blog about the
expedition, a team-member came running down the stairs to inform him they had a
spherule – a tiny metallic pearl, as he put it, about 0.3mm across. It soon transpired that this
was one of many, and was composed primarily of iron, magnesium and titanium. Loeb notes
that this is an unusual combination, both in human-made objects and meteorites.    

Could this be the first contact humans have ever had with a material from outside our Solar
System? 

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are a long trusted
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establishing their link to IM1. "Tiny
metallic spherules are exceedingly common on Earth," says Fries. They come from
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automobile exhaust, vehicle brakes, welding, volcanoes, and probably some more sources
we haven't identified," he says.  
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 Fries explains that there are certain clues that can indicate they have come from space,
including an iron oxide called wustite, the presence of nickel and certain isotopes. 

And even if the spherules are confirmed to have origins beyond everyday processes on
Earth, it's possible that they didn't come from IM1. It's thought that around 500 meteorites
slam into the Earth every year, so this fragment may have come from another impact. 

Loeb remains optimistic. The team plans to take the spherules to Harvard College
Observatory, where they will use spectrometry to identify the isotopes within – by analysing
their proportions relative to other meteorites, Loeb hopes to test whether IM1 really did
have interstellar origins. Alternatively, he suggests, it might confirm that they weren't
formed – but made, possibly by intelligent aliens.  

In any case, Loeb believes that there is no harm in checking.  

On this, even Fries agrees – as long as the correct scientific process is followed. "Science is
wonderful in that it is one of the most forgiving human institutions in existence," he says.
"Any scientist may propose any hypothesis, and any other scientist may test that
hypothesis… everyone learns something new and progress is made towards the truth of the
issue…We shall see how that proceeds in this particular case."  

-- 

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