Harvard professor Avi Loeb announced on Tuesday that he and a team of scientists conducted the first testing "in history" on remnants from a meteor that originated from outside the solar system.
Loeb said in a post on Medium that the scientists collected and tested around 700 spherules from IM1, the first-recognized interstellar meteor that flew over the Pacific Ocean and crashed in 2014. He led an expedition to recover any remnants from the meteor that were left behind from June 14-28, 2023.
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In 2019, Loeb and Amir Siraj, a then-undergraduate Harvard student, published their findings that IM1 was the first interstellar object to fall to Earth. In 2022, the U.S. Space Command confirmed in a letter to NASA that the object came from another solar system.
Tuesday's announcement marks the first time that scientists analyzed materials from an object outside of the solar system.
Stein Jacobsen, Havard professor of cosmochemistry, and his team discovered that five spherules showed a "composition pattern of elements from outside the solar system, never seen before."
Early analysis shows that some spherules from the meteor path contain "extremely high abundances" of an unheard-of composition of heavy elements. Researchers determined that the composition of beryllium, lanthanum, and uranium, labeled as a “BeLaU” composition, does not match alloys natural to Earth.
The composition is not found in magma oceans of Earth, the moon, Mars, or any other meteorites in the solar system, researchers said.
"This is a historic discovery because it represents the first time that humans put their hand on materials from a large object that arrived to Earth from outside the solar system," Loeb said. "The success of the expedition illustrates the value of taking risks in science despite all odds as an opportunity for discovering new knowledge."
The Harvard scientist said that, prior to entering the solar system, IM1 was moving at a speed of 60 kilometers per second, faster than 95% of all starts in the vicinity of the sun.
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"Based on the fact that it maintained its integrity at an impact speed on Earth of 45 kilometers per second down to an elevation of 17 kilometers above the Pacific Ocean, its material strength must have been tougher than all 272 space rocks documented by NASA in the CNEOS meteor catalog, including the 5% minority of them which are iron meteorites," Loeb said.
The spherules are being analyzed at laboratories at Harvard University, the University of California, Berkeley, the Bruker Corporation, and the University of Technology in Papua New Guinea.