An alien-hunting Harvard astrophysicist has said his research that may prove the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life will be published in the next month.
Professor Avi Loeb is leading an analysis of recovered fragments of the IM1 meteor that disintegrated in January 2014 over the Pacific off Manus Island, about 260 miles from Papua New Guinea.
IM1’s trajectory and speed strongly suggested the object was interstellar, and Loeb is attempting to prove whether the object was engineered, by using an analysis of tiny fragments recovered from the ocean floor.
What we are doing now is analyzing the composition of the molten droplets that fell off this object when it was exposed to the fireball that it created as it moved through the air,’ Loeb told Fox News on Monday.
‘And we are getting some interesting results, but I cannot detail them until we’ve put them together in a paper, scientific paper that we hope to make publicly available to everyone within a month or so,’ he added.
Scientists are already fairly certain that IM1 came from outside of the solar system, and Loeb’s analysis hopes to shed light on whether it is a normal space rock, or an engineered device such as a craft or probe.
‘This object was moving very fast, faster than 95 percent of the stars near the sun, and it also had material strength tougher than all the rocks we had seen over the past decade in the NASA catalogue,’ said Loeb.
‘So there is a chance, I wouldn’t quantify it, that it is different from a rock,’ the scientist added. ‘It’s definitely not a rock of the type we are familiar with.’
Loeb said that if the analysis shows signs that IM1 was engineered, it could offer evidence on extraterrestrial life.
‘It would mean that we have a neighbor, that we’re not alone. Just like realizing that when you go out to your backyard and you find a tennis ball that was thrown by a neighbor, you realize, ‘yes, I do have a neighbor,” he said.
‘We should welcome it. It will be information that we can learn from. It will inspire us to explore space. It may make us better instead of fighting with each other. Perhaps it will be a wake-up call for us to realize that there are more important things in life than fighting with other people,’ he said.
