Posted on 07/05/2023 8:20:44 AM PDT by bitt
Tiny spheres of once-molten metal magnetically dredged from the seafloor could be pieces from IM1, a potential interstellar meteor that struck Earth in 2014
Over the past two weeks, I have circumnavigated the globe by land, air and sea. The reason? A kitchen sink–sized chunk of interstellar material that my colleagues and I believe collided with the Earth at 100,000 miles per hour nearly a decade ago. After years of effort, we may have finally found pieces of this elusive object on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, about a mile beneath the waves.
The story began In April 2019, when I found what’s thought to be the first known interstellar meteor, hiding in plain sight in publicly accessible data sourced from the U.S. government. Called IM1, this object had burned up in the atmosphere and rained fragments down into the ocean off the coast of Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, five years prior, registering as an anomalously speedy and bright fireball in the sensors of secret spy satellites operated by the U.S. Department of Defense. Working with my then-adviser, the Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, I analyzed the U.S. government data to show how the trajectory and other properties of IM’s fireball were consistent with the meteor having an interstellar origin.
It seemed at first too good to be true; scientists had been searching for interstellar meteors for at least seven decades, and here I was, a sophomore in college sitting in my dorm room, thinking I’d bagged one. And sure enough, there was a catch—but it had nothing to do with my calculations. Because the data came from spy satellites, the U.S. government didn’t publish how precise the measurements were. And without knowing the level of precision, we couldn’t know for sure whether IM1 was truly interstellar, or just
(Excerpt) Read more at scientificamerican.com ...
Interesting, learn something every day.
The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes:
Flood, Fire, and Famine
in the History of Civilization
by Richard Firestone,
Allen West, and
Simon Warwick-Smith
I thought we were all made from another star.
Science has not come along that far yet.
Shouldn’t the title read meteorite instead of meteor or how did they catch the high speed meteor in flight?
TAKE ME TO YOUR LAWYER: THE LEGAL ASPECTS OF CONTACT WITH EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE
MICHAEL BOHLANDER·JULY 4, 2023
https://thedebrief.org/take-me-to-your-lawyer-the-legal-aspects-of-contact-with-extraterrestrial-intelligence/
A few years back scientists were claiming they had found meteorites from Mars in Antarctica.
“A few years back scientists were claiming they had found meteorites from Mars in Antarctica.”
Right. They come from a variety of sources including comets, planets and occasionally from another star system. Isotopic and trajectory analysis can help determine where it may have come from.
Nope
Most are from the asteroid belt, some rare ones came from impacts on Mars, less rare from impacts on the Moon, comets and their debris are from the Kuiper Belt.
The meteor Loeb is investigation was tracked at a velocity and vector which indicates it came from outside the solar system, and those are probably the rarest of all.
This can’t be from Scientific American. It never mentions climate change.
Is the Kuiper Belt the same as the Ort Cloud, or is the Ort Cloud an additional source for comets?
Gates and the morons on The Hill want to shade us from that big yellow star. How are their solar panels going to work then?
Right, I should have said the Ort cloud is the ultimate source, though of course they pass through the Kuiper Belt on their way in to the inner solar system.
Thanks.
I just read the whole article. At the end is the name of the author, his science background, and 2 articles he has written. The second article is titled:
The Solar System’s Oort Cloud May Harbor an Astonishing Number of Objects from Other Stars
It makes sense, and is analogous to the cloud of small objects (minor moons and detritus) that have been captured by Jupiter. Thanks glee’!
The Oort Cloud is an (unattested) ‘sphere’ that’s posited to be quite a bit further out, and is a mathematical construct that grows out of the common model for Solar System formation. The Kuiper Belt is much closer in, and is a second asteroid belt made up (so far) of larger minor bodies on highly elliptical orbits. Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNO) are a better-documented subset of the Kuiper Belt, and are between 30 and 48 AU (astronomical units) from the Sun.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/trans-neptunian-object
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