For nearly a decade, hundreds of tiny magnetic spheres left by an extraterrestrial visitor remained deep in the Pacific Ocean. Now, a scientific expedition has pulled out the little lumps – and they’re fueling a media frenzy that some scientists say is unwarranted.

In 2014, a fireball exploded in the sky over Papua New Guinea, flying over it, spewing debris. A nearby US government sensor measured the speed at over 177,000 km/h, and NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Objects Studies (CNEOS) recorded the drop. The meteorite fell into the ocean about 85 kilometers off the coast.

Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, is looking for him. Loeb believes the object, which he named Interstellar Meteor 1 (MM1), based on its extraordinary speed and trajectory after it entered Earth’s atmosphere, is a remnant from another star system. According to an interview Loeb gave, he believes it could potentially contain alien “techno-signatures” – traces of technology created by non-human beings. Daily Monster.

This isn’t Loeb’s first conjecture that our solar system has been visited by alien technology. Five years ago, he and Harvard researcher Shmuel Biali proposed that the strange interstellar object ‘Oumuamua, which passed near our solar system in late 2017, was an autonomous alien probe similar to a light sail. His articles on the object received widespread media attention, as well as backlash and praise from the wider scientific community.

Now, with the backing of cryptocurrency multimillionaire Charles Hoskinson, Loeb is leading an expedition in the Pacific Ocean to rescue MM1. The crew has so far captured more than 50 magnetospheres—small spheres of iron, magnesium, and titanium that could have been fragments of a meteorite. In a recent blog post, Loeb described these spheres as “abnormal”—possibly because they’re low in nickel, a common component in meteorites.

“It was the most exciting experience of my scientific career,” Loeb said of the expedition in a recent interview. motherboard.

But many scientists have doubts about the origin of the spheres. In fact, they say these particular pellets may not be related to the 2014 fireball at all.

“It’s been known for a century that if you take a magnetic rake and run it across the ocean floor, you’ll eject extraterrestrial spheres,” said meteorite expert Peter Brown of the University of Western Ontario in Canada. Brown added that such debris has accumulated worldwide over millions of years from meteorites that have left tiny bits of molten metal on the seafloor. Given the changing ocean currents and the movement of sediments, “it is fundamentally impossible to say that this particular sphere came from any particular event.”

Brown also recently co-authored a paper questioning the interstellar origin of MM1. The claim that the meteor came from outside the solar system is based on its ridiculous speed as it entered our atmosphere. Especially at high speeds, the US government’s sensors tend to overestimate speed, Brown said. According to Brown, the slower speed also explains the object’s unusual luminosity profile, which does not meet expectations for a metallic meteor traveling at more than 160,000 km/h.

Of course, this does not mean that the meteorite is not from another star system – it is simply not necessary. To date, there has not been a single confirmed fall of an interstellar asteroid to Earth, but Brown has spent 20 years searching for an asteroid.

As for the possibility of this being evidence of extraterrestrial technology, most of the scientific community is skeptical. “That would be a really great result,” Brown said. “But I see no evidence to support such an extreme hypothesis.”