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Avi Loeb's Pacific expedition dredges spherules near Manus Island

When
Landsat satellite image of Manus Island, Papua New Guinea
Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, near where Loeb's 2023 expedition dredged the seafloor NASA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Harvard's Avi Loeb led a June 2023 search off Papua New Guinea for fragments of the 2014 fireball IM1, recovering tiny metal spherules he said might be interstellar or even technological. Other scientists disputed it, attributing the material to coal ash and the seismic trace to a passing truck.

Sources

  1. FirsthandHave We Found Fragments of a Meteor from Another Star?Scientific American (Amir Siraj, expedition member) / 2023-07-05
  2. OtherAnthropogenic Coal Ash as a Contaminant in a Micro-meteoritic Underwater SearchResearch Notes of the AAS (Patricio A. Gallardo) / 2023-10
  3. OtherWas It an Alien Spacecraft--Or a Delivery Truck?Columbia Climate School, State of the Planet (Kevin Krajick) / 2024-04-09

How sources are chosen and tiered

How the story came out

  1. Jun 2023It happened (this event)
  2. 29 Aug 2023Loeb's team claims Pacific spherules have an extrasolar origin
  3. Mar 2024Study traces the seismic signal used to locate the 2014 'interstellar meteor' to a truck

See it on the timeline: happened vs became public

Where it fits

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