MEXICO CITY (apro).– Theoretical physicist and professor at Harvard University Abraham “Avi” Loeb celebrated a new discovery that could help confirm his theory about the existence of life on other planets.
In a column published in “El Confidencial”, he referred to his new discovery of the remains of IM1, known as the first interstellar object recognized as such, which fell between June 18 and 19 in the Pacific Ocean.
He said he had the coordinates of the location of IM1 and with the support of NASA he carried out an expedition to obtain remains of the precious object and demonstrate that they are not terrestrial and feed his hypothesis about life beyond Earth.
In the so-called “diary” published on the “Medium” platform, he indicated that on Monday, June 19, he found, together with his team of investigators, a corroded metal where the “IM1, made to withstand large impacts, crashed.
“But when Ryan Weed ran the fragment sample through the X-ray fluorescence analyzer, the most likely alloy he marked was S4 steel with titanium, also known as shock-resistant steel. The yield strength of S5 steel, 1.7 GPa is well above iron meteorites,” he stated on Medium.
He explained that the shape of the recovered fragments of the object are flat, when those that have thrown the 272 meteorites registered by NASA are oblique.
“The shape of the recovered fragments is almost flat, as if they were superficial layers detached from a technological object that experienced extreme material stress. The iron meteorites break into small pieces that are melted by the fireball into spheres that rain down and are recovered in nearly spherical fragments,” he noted.
For this reason, he did not rule out that the IM1 fireball is the result of a rupture of the superficial layers and that the nucleus of the object has survived the entry of the atmosphere, like spacecraft.
