Scientists have shared new insights regarding metal fragments recovered from the Pacific that came from outside our solar system.
Alien-hunting Harvard physicist Avi Loeb and his team published a preprint study Thursday, explaining that the properties of a meteor that crashed in 2014 'can be naturally explained.'
The researchers trawled the seafloor off the coast of New Guinea in June, finding about 700 tiny metallic spheres during the expedition, and the 57 analyzed contain compositions that are not known to be in our solar system.
The paper suggested that the properties formed when the Earth-like planet deviated from a circular orbit around a dwarf star, creating a stream of debris shooting into interstellar space.
Loeb wrote that during this event, a rocky planet's crust would melt, creating an abundance of beryllium, lanthanum and uranium, which were found in the metallic spheres pulled from the depths of the ocean.
While the new analysis points to a natural origin, Loeb suggested that abundant rare elements could have served a technological purpose.
'For example, lanthanum could have been melted from semiconductors, and uranium could have been used as fuel in a fission reactor,' he explained.
Loeb told DailyMail.com that he and his team 'plan to find out the true nature of IM1 by finding large pieces of it in our next expedition within the next nine months.'
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