In 2014, a brilliant fireball streaked across the sky over the Pacific Ocean, near Papua New Guinea. It was an interstellar visitor, a rare meteor that got here from outside our solar system. Its official name is CNEOS 2014-01-08, but additionally it is often known as IM1, short for Interstellar Meteor 1.
IM1 was detected by the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It had a really high speed of about 60 km/s, which is far faster than any known asteroid or comet in our solar system. It also had a really unusual trajectory, ranging from the constellation of Lyra and heading towards the constellation of Pegasus.
But much more extraordinary was what happened after IM1 exploded within the air, about 18 km above sea level. A team of researchers led by Professor Avi Loeb of Harvard University conducted extensive seafloor surveys along the calculated path of IM1, using a towed magnetic sled device.
They collected lots of of tiny balls, spherical particles that form when molten material cools rapidly in air.
Early evaluation shows that a few of the orbs within the meteors' path contain unusually high amounts of beryllium, lanthanum and uranium, tagged because the never-before-seen composition “BeLaU.”
These elements are very rare within the solar system, and their proportions don’t match any known natural or artificial alloy or meteorite. There are also very low levels of other elements within the beads, equivalent to iron and manganese, suggesting they evaporated through the air burst.
“Our research team's evaluation of 60 elements on the periodic table shows that these spheres usually are not coal ash and don’t come from the crust of the Earth, Moon or Mars. The BeLaU-type abundance pattern is unprecedented within the scientific literature and will have originated from variation within the magma ocean on an iron-core exoplanet.” says Avi Loeb.
Scientists suggest that these spherules are of extrasolar origin, meaning they come from another star system.
They suggest they may have formed during the igneous ocean phase of a differentiated planet, where heavy elements sink into the core and light elements rise to the surface. The high concentration of beryllium may indicate that the planet has been exposed to cosmic rays in the interstellar medium for a long time.
However, a preliminary paper by seismologist Benjamin Fernando of Johns Hopkins University and his colleagues, which has not yet been peer-reviewed or published in a journal, concludes that material recovered from the seafloor is “almost definitely unrelated” to the meteorite.
However, Loeb does not give up. “This press release was written by people who did no work. They didn't collect materials, they didn't analyze anything. They just sit on chairs and express their opinions.
In a post on Medium, Loeb responded further. “Astronomers who reject [satellite] data and claim it must be completely wrong, they should sleep at night because their lack of trust means their security is not assured and their taxes are wasted on unreliable national security infrastructure,” he wrote.
Loeb has since maintained that the chemical composition of a few of the spherules found during this search was unlike anything known in our solar system and “could have come from the highly differentiated magma ocean of an iron-core planet outside our solar system or from more exotic sources.”
This is a breakthrough discovery that might make clear the formation and evolution of planets orbiting other stars. This also raises many questions, equivalent to: How did IM1 escape from its original star system? How long did he travel in interstellar space? How common are interstellar meteorites and spherules? What other secrets do they hide?
Scientists plan to proceed analyzing the spherules and search for further evidence of their interstellar origins. They also hope to seek out more interstellar meteors in the longer term using improved detection and recovery methods. They imagine that studying these cosmic messengers could reveal latest insights into the character and variety of life within the universe.
Image Source: Pixabay.com
