Systematic Scientific Search for Evidence of Extraterrestrial Technological Artifacts

Here is update on the analysis of the remains of interstellar meteor IM1. There was a paper claiming the IM1 remains were coal ash but that is disproved.

The detection threshold of surveys which rely on reflected sunlight sets the minimum size of a detectable object as a function of its distances from the observer and the Sun. Comets are more easily detectable than non-evaporating objects, because their tail of gas and dust reflects sunlight beyond the extent of their nucleus. Meteors, on the other hand, are found through the fireball they produce as they disintegrate by friction with air in the Earth’s atmosphere. This makes meteors detectable at object sizes that are many orders of magnitude smaller than space objects. For example, CNEOS 2014-01-08 was merely ∼0.5 meters in size whereas a sunlight-reflecting object like ‘Oumuamua was detectable within the orbit of the Earth around the Sun because its size was ∼100–200 meter. The nucleus of the comet Borisov was ∼200–500meter in size and its evaporation made the comet detectable even farther because of its larger tail. NASA never launched a spacecraft as big as ‘Oumuamua. ISOs like CNEOS 2014-0108 are a million times more abundant than ‘Oumuamua near Earth, but they were not detectable by the Pan STARRS survey which discovered ‘Oumuamua.

The Galileo Project will develop software that will identify ISOs that do not resemble familiar asteroids or comets from the Solar system. This software will be applied to the LSST data pipeline.

There is a new 5 page pre-print paper by the Galileo Project team.

Analysis of the trajectory suggested an interstellar origin of the meteor. The object, labeled IM1 for Interstellar Meteor 1, arrived with a velocity relative to Earth of more than 45 kilometers per second and originated from outside the plane of the ecliptic. On 1 March 2022, the US Space Command issued a formal letter to NASA certifying a 99.999% likelihood that the object was interstellar in origin. Along with this letter, the US Government released the fireball light curve as measured by satellites, which showed three flares separated by a tenth of a second from each other. The bolide broke apart at an unusually low altitude of about 17 kilometers. The object was substantially stronger than any of the other 272 objects in the CNEOS catalog of fireballs compiled by NASA, including the 5%-fraction of iron meteorites from the solar system. Calculations of the fireball light energy suggest that about 500 kilograms of material was ablated by the fireball and converted into ablation spherules with a small efficiency.

Cosmic spherules are often sub-divided into three compositional types. These are the silicate-rich spherules or S-type, the Fe-rich spherules or I-type and glassy spherules or G-types. Relatively rare spherules have been called differentiated as they have similarities to achondrite meteorites and have been treated as a subgroup of S-type spherules. Differentiated spherules have major-element compositions with higher Si/Mg and Al/Si ratios, and higher refractory lithophile trace element contents relative to chondritic spherules.

The major element compositions of 745 spherules from the IM1 site, measured by micro-XRF, were plotted in a Mg-Si-Fe ternary diagram, since such a diagram has been shown to effectively distinguish the S-, I- and G-type groups. About 78 % of the spherules fall along the trend of S, G and I-type spherules. These are referred to as primitive spherules as they are thought to be related to primitive chondritic meteorites and represent materials that have not gone through planetary differentiation. The remaining 22% of the spherules have low Mg and plot close to the Si-Fe side of the diagram. These spherules are thus called differentiated, meaning they are likely derived from crustal rocks of a differentiated planet. Since they are clearly different from the differentiated subgroup of S-type spherules we gave them a new name: D-type spherules. The primitive and differentiated spherules are divided based on their Mg/Si ratio. Primitive spherules have Mg/Si >1/3, while differentiated spherules have Mg/Si

They compared the average composition of BeLaU spherules for 55 elements with the SRM1633a coal ash standard in the figure attached below. Many volatile elements (Zn, As, Se, Cd, Tl, Pb and Bi) are enriched in the coal fly ash by factors of about 10 to 100 compared to the BeLaU spherules. Some refractory elements (Be, Ca, Cr, Fe, Y, Tm, Yb, Lu and W) are depleted by factors of 3 to 10 in coal fly ash when compared to BeLaU spherules. Thus, BeLaU spherules do not have the composition of coal ash, making the aforementioned claims invalid.

The Avi Loeb Galileo Team are currently developing the tools to find bigger pieces of IM1. In parallel, they continue to analyze the remaining spherules that we retrieved in the first expedition, including isotopes that could help us in dating the age of its material.

Small melted prices of the IM1 interstellar meteor have been found and measured. The tiny pieces have levels beryllium (Be), lanthanum (La) and uranium (U), dubbed “BeLaU” that are hundreds of times above solar-system rocks. Can we determine whether IM1 was natural or technological in origin? The team led by Avi Loeb of Harvard who found the remains of the crashed meteor will try.

IM1 was detected over the South Pacific, off the northern coast of Papua New Guinea, in 2014. It is also called CNEOS 20140108. The meteor had an estimated mass of 460 kg and was between 80 cm and 1 m (2.6-3.3 feet) in diameter. A few milligrams of material that have been found. Many larger multi-kilogram pieces could still be found.

UPDATE: Nextbigfuture has a new articles that explain that spaceships are not immortal. They stop working but unlike regular ships they do not sink into the ocean. Spaceships just keep coasting until they crash.

If natural, IM1 could be the product of a planet with a magma ocean and an iron core, where elements with affinity to iron sink towards the core and other elements left behind in the planet’s crust reflect the “BeLaU” abundance pattern discovered in their new scientific paper.

In an unprecedented gesture, the arXiv administrators chose to highlight the paper with a dedicated video featuring a summary of the paper’s findings, read by artificial intelligence (AI).

If IM1 was technological in origin, then the enhanced abundance of heavy elements in “BeLaU”-type spherules could have resulted from the fact that LaO over Mo or W sulfide substrates are promising materials for 2D semiconductors in nanotech fabrication. Uranium is used in fission reactors.

Radioactive isotopes in the “BeLaU”-type spherules can be used as clocks, based on their known half-life and the relative abundance of daughter and parent nuclei.

Stephen Wolfram sent Avi a list of a wide range of useful isotopes with a relevant half-life for measuring the duration of interstellar journeys.

The abundance of beryllium would accumulate from interstellar cosmic-ray collisions.

Measuring the duration of IM1’s journey and multiplying it by its known velocity outside the solar system, could inform us of the distance and direction of its source star.

They will try to use AI code to simulate the properties of alloys based upon the mixture of elements they have found.

They have mapped where the excess IM1 spherules were located relative to the background material in the control regions that they surveyed. They can forecast where large pieces could have landed based on their size. Smaller objects slow down faster because of their larger area-to-volume ratio.