(NewsNation) — Researchers on the interstellar expedition team of the Galileo Project completed an early analysis of fragments from the first recognized interstellar meteor, which crashed on Earth in 2014.
Avi Loeb, the head of the Galileo Project, announced the expedition’s success Thursday in a Diary of Interstellar Voyage report, saying scientists were able to analyze 57 spherules from the meteor-size object’s crash site and that 700 spherules were collected overall. Scientists refer to the interstellar meteor-sized object as IM1, believing that the object had originated from outside our solar system.
According to the report, scientists analyzed five millimeter-size marbles that originated as molten droplets from the meteor, formed from the heat from the fireball when IM1 crashed through Earth’s atmosphere.
“It took us a few days on board the aluminum ship, which is fittingly called Silver Star, to get the magnetic sled on the ocean floor and a few more days to understand what we collected,” Loeb said.
U.S. government satellites detected the meteor in 2014 when it crashed and tracked the crash site to the South Pacific Ocean. The object was confirmed to have an interstellar origin by the U.S. Space Command to NASA in 2022. Scientists were able to detect this by the rate of speed the fireball was moving, which was faster than 95% of all stars in the vicinity of the Sun, the report said.
An analysis of the object’s material is ongoing, being studied by researchers at Harvard University, UC Berkeley, Bruker Corporation and the University of Technology in Papua New Guinea.
So far, scientists have identified levels of uranium and lead, according to a report by Sci.News.
“In the coming weeks, we will examine further any clue for the spherules being different from solar system materials,” Loeb said.