A Harvard University astrophysicist claims to have made a significant advancement in the quest for extraterrestrial life. Professor Avi Loeb thinks he may have discovered pieces of alien technology from a meteor that crashed in 2014 off the coast of Papua New Guinea.
According to CBS News, Loeb and his team just brought the materials back to Harvard for analysis. The U.S. Space Command can confirm with almost near certainty, 99.999%, that it came from another solar system. The government gave Loeb a 10-kilometre (6.2-mile) radius of where it may have landed.
"That is where the fireball took place, and the government detected it from the Department of Defence. It's a very big area, the size of Boston, so we wanted to pin it down," said Loeb. "We figured the distance of the fireball based on the time delay between the arrival of the blast wave, the boom of the explosion, and the light that arrived quickly."
According to USA Today, the fragments the team uncovered are believed to be from a basketball-sized meteorite that in 2014 slammed into the Earth's atmosphere and into the western Pacific Ocean.
Originating from outside the solar system, the meteor moved at a speed two times faster than nearly all of the stars in the vicinity of the sun, Loeb said.
"We found ten spherules. These are almost perfect spheres, or metallic marbles. When you look at them through a microscope, they look very distinct from the background," explained Loeb. "They have colours of gold, blue, and brown, and some of them resemble a miniature of the Earth."