Confusion over the alleged discovery of an object that is not part of the solar system

Last week, Abraham Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, USA, along with a team of scientists, announced a surprising discovery. In a paper published on the Archiv site, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, the team claims to have found hundreds of tiny metal spheres on the sea floor off the coast of Papua New in Oceania. A meteorite from space that collided with Earth in 2014.

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The study was surprising because it was a new clue to better understanding how planets formed. However, other researchers viewed Loeb’s published paper with some skepticism. According to them, in order to reach such a conclusion as they mentioned, all aspects of the fireball that entered the atmosphere must be measured very precisely (if it survived), which apparently was not done in 2014, explained astronomer Maria Hajdukova. For the news portal of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava Nature.

There are other reasons why critics believe it’s better to wait to see those results. One of the main issues is how difficult it is to detect interstellar matter. What happened in 2017 when astronomers identified an object going outside the solar system: 1I/’Oumuamua, was surrounded by various theories about its origin. For some, it could be a fragment of a comet, a hydrogen glacier, or a chunk of nitrogen ice from a distant dwarf planet like Pluto.

Another good example happened two years later with another interstellar object called 21/Borisov. Until now, they were the only recorded interstellar objects.

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Where do interstellar objects come from?

Scientists estimate that interstellar matter is abundant. If one of them gravitationally interacts with another, it can throw it on a trajectory that sends it to our solar system, which happened with ‘Oumuamua and Borisov, which were considered simple comets or asteroids and later rejected by their “hyperbolic”. Orbits would reveal that they are not gravitationally bound to our Sun.

The most interesting thing about these materials is that they can provide additional information about the chemistry of distant planetary systems.

For now, Loeb’s team said Nature His team plans to further analyze the meteorite found in Papua New, including an assessment of oxygen isotopes, to confirm whether it has a different composition from our own solar system.

Vera C. in Chile. More discoveries about interstellar matter are expected to be made with the inauguration of the Rubin Observatory, which will begin operations in 2024. Its mission is to scan the sky every three nights to find more interstellar objects.