Given all of the other strange news making the rounds this month about space travel, UFOs, and unusual objects, this seems like a rather timely story. Regular readers may already be familiar with Harvard Physicist Avi Loeb. A few years ago, astronomers detected an object hurtling through the solar system which was dubbed Oumuamua. It was unusual because they determined that it had originated from outside our solar system, the first such confirmed interstellar traveler we’d seen. Dr. Loeb caused some waves in the scientific community when he said that his observations of Oumuamua suggested that it might not be a space rock, but instead, possibly a technological object of some kind, potentially from outside our solar system. We’ll never know for sure since it continued on and headed back out into deep space.

That gave Loeb an idea. He went back with some of his graduate students and began scanning all of NASA’s data regarding meteors that fall into the Earth’s atmosphere. After a long search, he found one with a speed and apparent composition that also appeared to have been interstellar in origin. He named it IM1 (Interstellar Metor 1). Even more fascinating, the NASA data was precise enough to determine that the object probably wasn’t your usual meteorite and was likely composed of something much denser and harder, potentially suggesting something technological. He was also able to plot right where it came down, just off the coast of Australia.

Rather than leaving that mystery on the shelf, Avi Loeb decided to investigate. He’s the head of the Galileo Project and he raised private funds to mount an expedition to go see if any remnants of it could be recovered. (Disclosure: I sent him a few bucks myself because it sounded like a fascinating project.) This month, his ship arrived at the site and began searching for debris by dragging large magnetic sleds across the sea bed. (It’s rather shallow there.) Well, yesterday they found… something. It’s still too soon to say for sure, but it doesn’t look or act like a space rock.

On Run 6 of the magnetic sled through the likely crash site of the first recognized interstellar meteor, IM1, the expedition research team recovered shards of corroded iron. At first, we thought it may be common industrial iron associated with human-made ocean trash. But when Ryan Weed ran the sample of shards through the X-ray Fluorescence (XRF) analyzer, the most likely alloy it flagged is X5 steel with titanium, which is also known as shock-resisting steel.

The yield strength of S5 steel, 1.7 GPa, is well above that of iron meteorites. This is consistent with the fact that IM1 was tougher in material strength than all other 272 meteors in the CNEOS catalog of NASA.

Most importantly, the shape of the recovered shards is nearly flat — as if they were surface layers broken off from a technological object which experienced extreme material stress.

Dr. Loeb wanted to be very clear that more testing is required. He describes the material as resembling what he calls “shock-resisting steel.” They are testing the material using gamma-ray spectrometers and a bunch of other gear I could probably neither spell nor pronounce. And he concedes that it may still turn out that these materials could all be of human origin. For all I know he could be finding scraps from the crash of MH370. (The original search area for the plane was off the coast of Australia so it’s not all that crazy of an idea.)

But what if it’s not? Loeb explains that they should be able to detect certain short-lived radioactive isotopes, like Aluminum-26 in the samples with their equipment. Any object that traveled through interstellar space for vast periods of time would not have those isotopes present. Any recently manufactured metals from Earth would certainly have them. What if these samples don’t?

The flat, dense nature of the samples suggests that they aren’t from a standard meteorite that burned up in our atmosphere. And they’re located in the right place for a debris field created by IM1. I’m not getting my hopes up just yet, but this could turn out to be an exciting discovery. And it wouldn’t be the first one that Avi has made in his distinguished career. More on that below:

Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He chairs the advisory board for the Breakthrough Starshot project, and is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. His new book, titled “Interstellar”, is scheduled for publication in August 2023.