Presenter
Avi Loeb, Harvard University
Avi Loeb is the Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science at Harvard University and a bestselling author (in lists of the New York Times,Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, L'Express and more). He chaired the Advisory Committee for the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative (2015-2024) and served as the Science Theory Director for all Initiatives of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation. In 2012, TIME magazine selected Loeb as one of the 25 most influential people in space and in 2020 Loeb was selected among the 14 most inspiring Israelis of the last decade. In 2024, Loeb was ranked number 3 in publication record and impact of research among all astronomers worldwide over the past 5 years by ScholarGPS.
Summary:
Over the past decade, the first four interstellar objects were discovered. They include two interstellar meteors, IM1 and IM2, detected on January 8, 2014 and March 9, 2017, `Oumuamua detected on October 19, 2017, and Borisov detected on August 29, 2019. Among these four, the first three appeared anomalous relative to known solar-system rocks whereas the fourth appeared as a familiar comet. IM1 and IM2 exhibited the highest material strength among all meteorites in the CNEOS catalog of NASA, `Oumuamua exhibited a flat shape and non-gravitational acceleration with no detectable cometary evaporation. In June 2023 we recovered 850 spherules from the Pacific Ocean site IM1. In addition, the Galileo Project Observatories at Harvard, Colorado and Pennsylvania are monitoring millions of objects in the infrared, optical, radio and audio and analyzing their nature with machine-learning software. I will discuss our findings as well as the possible origins of interstellar objects.
