Expedition team lead by Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb uncovers unprecedented materials from impact site of 2014 interstellar object

CAMBRIDGE, MA — September 23, 2024 — A multi-year expedition and investigation into the mysterious interstellar meteor CNEOS 2014-01-08 (IM1) has culminated in the publication of a major new paper by Professor Avi Loeb and his team in the prestigious Elsevier journal Chemical Geology. The paper, titled Chemical classification of spherules recovered from the Pacific Ocean site of the CNEOS 2014-01-08 (IM1)...

Generous grant from Richard King Mellon Foundation to fund establishment and operation of a third instrument station in Pennsylvania

CAMBRIDGE, MA/PITTSBURGH, PA — April 26, 2024 — The Galileo Project at Harvard University is thrilled to announce a generous grant of $575,000 from the Richard King Mellon Foundation. This grant will support the Galileo Project’s endeavor to establish a third observatory station, to be located in either Allegheny or Westmoreland County in Pennsylvania.

The grant from the Richard King Mellon Foundation will...

In a recent preprint, Fernando et al. (2024) used public data from infrasound stations to constrain the localization of the fireball of the CNEOS 2014-01-08 (IM1) bolide. The analysis inferred a 90%-confidence ellipse with semi-minor and semi- major axes of 186 and 388 km, respectively. This large error ellipse includes the much better localization box derived by sensors aboard U.S. Government satellites which detected the fireball light. At the fireball’s peak brightness, the CNEOS localization box documented by NASA/JPL measures 11.112 km on a side and is centered on a latitude of 1.3...