Well here's one for the UFO crowd:
Scientists claim they have recovered material that originated outside our solar system for the first time in history.
Alien-hunting Harvard physicist Professor Avi Loeb said early analysis of metal fragments his team recovered from the Pacific Ocean in June suggests they came from interstellar space.
Here's one of the "tiny metallic spheres" measuring just millimeters in diameter, which landed in the Pacific Ocean during the splashdown of an unidentified object in 2014:
That, in and of itself, is remarkable. "Interstellar space" is, to put it mildly, extremely big. The likelihood of any object at all finding its way through the unthinkable vastness of space, through the Solar System, past the outer planets and onto the surface of the Earth seems like a huge statistical improbability.
So how did the team of scientists, working under a budget of $1.5 million, determine that these meteor fragments came from outside the Solar System? Well, simply put, the fragments had a different composition than other objects studied closer to us.
We discovered spherules that appear to be from a different solar system due to their ultra high abundance of Beryllium, Lanthanum, and Uranium (thus BeLaU). The paper should be online soon and we can't wait for the peer review process. We also have a fairly good idea where the large fragments landed for the next expedition, which will allow us to determine if the object was artificial or just part of another planet's core. Regardless, this result means we likey have the first extrasolar object ever recovered.
In essence, the team believes the material likely came from magma on a different planet.
Leob explained it in nerd talk this way:
The measured abundances of heavy elements beyond lanthanum are consistently well beyond those of the solar system standard of CI chondrites, suggesting that "BeLaU"-spherules originated from outside the solar system. The source had a very low content of elements with affinity to iron, such as Rhenium (Re). The birth site of IM1 could have been a differentiated crust of an exo-planet with an iron core and a magma ocean.
Of course, this raises questions in my mind. When we say "interstellar," we're talking about objects from lightyears away. But beyond Pluto, it is theorized that there's a massive disk of debris we call the Oort Cloud that has all sorts of rocks and ice that help supply the comets we see out there.
We say "theorized" because it's too dark and too far for us to see. Yet the very idea of the cloud is a necessity of sorts, since it is needed to explain why a Solar System that is supposedly billions of years old still has ice on comets that should have long boiled away.
We're in the infancy of understanding the ultra-fine-tuned, artistic engineering of the cosmos (that totally came about by random chance, according to atheists), but we are certain this rock came from either 1) an alien planetary core eruption or 2) was taken from a core and made into something by alien beings.
More on that: It's worth noting that Professor Loeb is a fanatic when it comes to proving the existence of extraterrestrial life, and while mad scientists on the edges of their field have often contributed greatly to the actual advancement of our scientific understanding, the principle doesn't follow in every situation.
So when Loeb's co-author, Charles Hoskinson, says, "We also have a fairly good idea where the large fragments landed for the next expedition, which will allow us to determine if the object was artificial or just part of another planet's core," you can assume the likely news release we'll get next year announcing that our advanced alien overlords accidentally crashed yet another ship into our little blue planet.
Loeb also says the provenance of the objects "is the next question his research aims to answer."
The arrival of the object and fragments in 2014 means these tiny spheres are reportedly the first known interstellar objects to have even visited our Solar System; previously, the space object Oumuamua was given that designation when it was discovered during a Solar System flyby in 2017.
From the Scientific American on that subject:
To Loeb, the most plausible explanation was as obvious as it was sensational: taken together with its possibly pancakelike shape and high reflectivity, ‘Oumuamua's anomalous acceleration made perfect sense if the object was in fact a light sail — perhaps a derelict from some long-expired galactic culture.
COUNT DOOKU??
In late 2018 Loeb and his co-author Shmuel Bialy, a Harvard postdoctoral fellow, published a paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters arguing that ‘Oumuamua had been nothing less than humanity's first contact with an artifact of extraterrestrial intelligence.
Methinks there are certain sci-fi presuppositions already baked into this analytical cake, and like a professor once told me, even mathematicians arrive at different answers based on their assumptions!
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