The longest-serving chair of Harvard's astronomy department was snapped up by the White House. He is going to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
NBC reported yesterday that Loeb wants to recover fragments of a meteorite that fell to Earth in 2014. A not-yet-peer-reviewed paper published in arXiv by Loeb and one of his students stated that the meteorite must have been made of material tougher than iron to survive its trip.
It might be from a distant alien civilization.
"We're going to board the ship and build a sled and a magnet that will scoop the ocean floor," he said. We will go back and forth, like mowing the lawns across the region, 10 kilometers in size and collect with the magnets, all the fragments that are attracted to it, and then brush them off and study their composition in the lab.
The professor's ideas are worth listening to because he isn't known for being a crazy scientist. It would be great to find alien tech from another solar system, but we don't think it will happen.
According to Space.com, the object is only 1.5 feet long, and it crashed 200 miles off the north coast of one of the more remote islands in the world. It hit with about 1 percent of the force of the bomb, so it's at least somewhat destroyed.
We wish the professor and his team the best on their journey, but we're not holding our breath, because there's a lot of tiny seafloor chunks to sort with or without a magnet.
NASA scientist says that the name of the planet is definitely a distraction.
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