Abraham Loeb has acquired some notoriety as an interstellar-space expert. Last Tuesday Dr Loeb formally displayed his great balls of an extrasolar metallic meteor. Five of 'em.
I have observed 48 Hour Rule, before this poast. This blog has been burned by bad meteor claims before. I'd rather have waited until Colavito's take but, well, here we are.
Of the 57 millimeter-wide "spherules" (out of 722) which Loeb has examined, 52 might be volcanic, that is from Earth. But five of them have beryllium which tends to be made from other nuclei getting whacked by cosmic rays - the word is "spallated". As to those nuclei left over, a lot of it is uranium and lanthanum. This stuff isn't common on Earth's crust, nor any crust. But the alloy is, apparently, strong enough to survive a 45 km/s pounding through our atmosphere.
Either it came from some lavaworld's crust or else from a starship - says Avi Loeb. Sigh.
Okay - I am not all-on-board with Loeb. But. Loeb did have the gumption to raise $1.5 million to trawl the ocean under 2 km. If his detractors don't like it, they should have got out there earlier... or for that matter they can go now. Also: it wasn't Loeb who said this meteor was likely extraterrestrial, but NASA which clocked this thing at the Borisov-tier speed it came in by - which was 60 km/s against galactic-standard (and not being ecliptic but then, that is also true of comets).
Loeb is selling a book - Interstellar - and since he's obviously-interested, other researchers had better check his work. There are 722-57 spherules left. Have at it, lab-bros.
UPDATE 9/3: Steve Desch doesn't want to believe.
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