Of a life of Frederick Douglass written in 1845 it describes his childhood years on Eastern Shore of maryland, his time as a slave in baltimore and his escape north. Our guest is a historian and author. Watch books that shaped america weeknights at nine eastern on cspan or go to cspan. Org books that shaped america to view the series and learn more about each book featured. Abraham avi loeb is a franklin baird junior professor of science at Harvard University, the longestserving chair of Harvard Department of astronomy, the founding director of Harvard Black hole initiative, director of the institute for theory and computation, itc, within the Harvard Smithsonian center for astrophysics. He also heads the galileoeo project, chairs the Advisory Committee for the breakthrough star shot initiative, and is former chair of the board on physics and astronomy of the national academy. Author of eight books booe than 1000 scientific papers, he is elected fellow of the American Academy of arts and sciences, the american physical society, and the International Academy of astronautics. In 2012, times selected him as one of the 25 most influential people in space. His latest book, interstellar the search for extraterrestrial life our future in theri star is available for purchase from our partner bookseller politics and prose. If you use link in the chat box which is also available on our website you will be able to purchase the book with 10 discount. Just make sure you useco the coe special ten when checking out. Now please join me in welcoming to the smithsonian associates, are below. Avi loeb. Thank you, mary beth it is a privilege to join you. And i wouldli like to show some slides and i will be delighted to answer any questions you have after the presentation. So indeed my book just came out, and the title of the book turned out to be a conclusion of a scientific paper that ihe wrote that i will describe that was the focus of the summer of 2023 for me, which was a very exhausting experience of trying to get to evidence related to an object that came from outside the solar system. The bottom line is its interstellar. And i wrote of course the book before we knew the results, and in general, the book addresses the fundamental aspects of finding evidence for technological objects near earth that were manufactured by a partner civilization out there. And just like in life, finding a partner will change the meaning of our life. And so let me start with a few words about the Galileo Project. Thats a scientific project that i am leading at Harvard University of scientists interested in systematic study in search of technological gadgets that arrived to the solar system from far away, not from earth. And what we already excuse me . I dont think youve actually shared your screen. Oh, really . Yeah. Okay. Lets make sure that it works this time. Can you see it now . Perfect. Just god ahead and make it full screen and were good to go. Okay. Thank you very much. This is the cover of my book, and then this is a picture, a team photo of the Galileo Project. And then what you see here is the design of the first observatory that is already operational at Harvard University, and basically monitors the sky 24 7 for any objects that look unusual. There are reportsts of military personnel and intelligence agencies that the sensors of the u. S. Government record every now and then anomalous objects in the sky that may not be of human origin and definitely not natural. So we want to get to the bottom of the nature of these objects by a a systematic study. Its not anecdote. Its not a pilot and a fighter jet noticing something unusual by being in the right place at the right time. This is a survey of the entire sky all the time someone vantage point. But then what we are planning on making copies of this observatory andin placing them n many geographical locations. And what you see here are the units that make up the observatory. They included the infrared cameras that look at the entire sky all the time and detect heat from objects, even at nighttime when the sun is not illuminating them. We also have an optical band, a chemist that w looks at the ente sky, and we have a passive radar that is detecting the reflection of radio wavesio from radio stations off any object in the sky. And we, in addition, have an acoustic system that detects sound waves from objects in the sky. All of our sensors are passive, intentionally, because we dont want to affect any human made objects in the sky by absorbing them. And we also have an instrument that measures the weather. And let me just show you a short video that describes the various instruments. Welcome to an overview of the Galileo ProjectDevelopment Site codenamed collision run for our instrumentation suite consist of the wide field and narrow field sesectors. Widefield sensors are used for target selection and tracking. Narrow fields gather highresolution data. Our main instrument is a hemispherical array of eight infrared cameras. Next to it is the outer core, a secondary highresolution optical camera. Ly together these incidents continues to monitor and track objects in the sky analyzing them in realtime for potential anomaly activity. This is a miss, artistic monitor system designed to detect and record acoustic signature across the interest on it audible and ultrasonic manse. Amos houses an antenna for logging aircraft transponder data. Allowing us to quickly separate known from unknown object. Here we have sky watch a multi static radar system designed to track and multiple object sometimes measuring object positions and kinematics. And pacman is Environmental Monitoring system for measuring local weather conditions. Senses include an anemometer come a temperature and pressure sensors, a particle counter eight floodgate magnetometer. Next up inspector radio spectrum analyzer with a wideband and information radio and microwave. Beacon is truly are only narrow field instrument. Beacon is a highresolution handheld is in camera capable of 40 times optical zoom. Our instruments collect a wide range of data all of which is that you are computing enclosure housed beneath an outdoor instrument. Here, data is processed and analyzed in realtime. Objects detected and tracked by the widefield instruments are localized in 3d space and analyze for unusual characteristics. Selected targets are then fed ts the beacon for followup observation. Io finally, dated his record and upload it to the cloud. These combined systems comprise the currentnt version of the observatory class system with many refinements competitions and upgrade scheduled for nearterm implementation at pigeon run. So the important point to realize is the sky is not classified and, therefore, we dont need to wait for the u. S. Government to declassify information about the sky. We can do a systematic study of the sky and use computers to tell us ifg theres anything unusual. These are Machine Learning algorithms that can identify birds, airplanes, drones, balloons, i tell us if theres anything else out there. And, of course, the u. S. Government is mostly interested in anything that is a National Security threat. For as far as science is concerned, anything that says made in china is boring. What we want to see is even one objectct out of 1000 a thot may be from outside of this earth. Is there Something Like that . And we are planning to expand the current observatory to a bigger system that will include the data from satellites, will include cameras from different locations that allow us to triangulate and figure out the distance of objects in the sky. So this is work work in pr. And we are also identifying places in the United States not near any sensitive strategic site, but anywhere where there were rorts of unidentified anomalous phenomena. And a currently, we arelanning another obsertory in colorado. We have funding for a few more, but we are seeking additional funding to expand the system to about 100 observatories, that would be very helpful. And, of course, we complement the work of government in the sense that were happypy to share any data that shows human made objects with washington d. C. , if theres interest. There is satellite data that we are currently analyzing that was obtained by planet labs. Its public data, and wish to see if there any unusual objects by looking at them from above, not just from below. So altogether we have a plan for the future with different phases. Phases. Phase one is where we are rig now, and we plan to expand the system with more components. Some of which could be relatively cheap so that would allow us also mobile observatory. And we wrote about eight scientific papers about the observatory, and everything is public, our data will be open. We do not hide anything, and were happy to discuss it. Thats the way science is done. Now, my interest as an astronomer in the subject started with the discovery act in october 2017 by a telescope in hawaii that detected an object near earth this telescope was a survey telescope of the sky initiated as a result of a congressional decision to monitor the sky for any object larger than the size of a football field, which reflects enough light from the sun for us to see it. Small objects cannot be seen with existing telescopes, and this pan starts observatory was constructed in hawaii, started looking around and found this object in 2017 silva because he came close to earth. It was a size of of a football field. It was not bound to the sun by gravity. It came from outside the solar system based on its high speed, and it was given the name or more and more, which means the scout in the hawaiian language. Now, for me, it was a surprise, very intriguing discovery, because a decade earlier i predicted there should be any rocks discovered by panstarrs from other stars arriving the other stars arriving to the solar system, based on what we know about the solar system and the subject implies theres a much Larger Population than i expected so making a mistake in science is very important because it basically tells you as a scientist that the recent nature is sending us interstellar objects. This object appeared weirder and weirder as we got more data on it, its shape appeared to be that of a pancake, flat shaped based on the reflection of sunlight from it as it was tumbling and this was by various astronomers that its most likely flat. Moreover, there was another team that realized that its actually being pushed away from the sun by some Mysterious Force without seeing any cometary tail, nothing to give it a kick as a result of the rocket effect. That implied that its an unusual object not the like an asteroid because it was pushed away from the sun by some force and asteroids are just rocks that have no function and its not a comet because we havent seen any tail of gas or dust around it, and the space telescope looked deeply around it and couldnt find anything. So, my suggestion was, maybe its the reflection of sunlight thats pushing it and for that, the object had to be very thin, and in nature, it doesnt make thin objects so i suggested, maybe it was the outer layer of the technological gadget or a broken piece of some mega structure, constructed by technological civilization that makes up for some space trash passing near earth. Actually, three years later, there was another object found by the same telescope and it was pushed away from the sun by reflecting sunlight, no cometary tail and ended up being a rocket booster launch. Here you have it, the properties associated with it original rated for another object. As a result of it being thin and made of stainless steel, that object, we know, is technological because we made it. The question is, who made it, and a couple of years after that, after it was discovered, i was interviewed on the radio about it and about the meteor found over the bering sea, just a couple of weeks earlier and i looked at the web and found a catalog from nasa of meteors and it included velocity information. So i told my students at the time, i said why dont we check if any of the fastest moving meteors may have originated from outside the solar system because i was intrigued by the existence of it. And this one was detected by u. S. Government satellites, and it was discovered in january, 2014, almost a decade ago and nobody paid attention to it until would he realized that its speed implies that it came from outside the solar system. There was an object in this catalog that came from outside the solar system and moving at 60 kilometers per second outside, not that it was bound to the sun, but it was moving faster than 95 of all stars in the vicinity of the sun relative to the socalled local standard of the milky way great lakes crossingy than almost all galaxy. And faster than 95 of the stars and maintained its integrity down to the lower atmosphere of the earth. And from that we concluded that it had material strength, higher than all space rocks from the solar system that were identified from nasa over the past decade, 272 of them. So i decided to lead an expedition to search for any leftover material from the explosion of this meteor because it could have been a voyagerlike meteor, just imagine the spacecraft voyager that we launched that will exit the solar system within 10,000 years that will leave the outskirts of the solar system and will not be functional and could collide with a planet like earth, and show up as a meteor, unusual strength because of the stainless steel and it benefitted from artificial propulsion and we decided to have an expedition to the pacific ocean. I managed to get one and a half Million Dollars from a private donation and established a team that went there. So, let me show you a photo album of this from this expi expedition of a ship, the star, the something of the song that you will hear. So this trip took place between the 14th and the 28th of june this year and i will show the findings in a few slides, but first, let me explain the motivation. So we realized this was the first object discovered actually from outside the solar system because it was found 2014, almost four years before. It was roughly half a meter in size and we wrote a paper about it and reviewers of the paper rejected it. They said we dont believe the data from the u. S. Government. At the time i was sharing the physics and astronomies of the National Academies and i expressed my frustration at one of the dinners we had in washington and some people approached me and said that they will be glad to help, and actually a person from the white house contacted the u. S. Space command and it took three years. The Government Works slowly just to make sure there is no Important Information being released here, and in march, 2022, the u. S. Space command issued the letter that you see on the left, sent it to nasa and this memo basically said that they confirm that this meteor was interstellar in origin, came from outside the solar system and 99. 99 confident. And so, at that point, we resubmitted a paper for publication in the physical journal and it was accepted. And in addition, the u. S. Government released the light curve of the fireball which allowed us to figure out the properties of the objects. And the objects exploded about 70 miles away from the island in papau new guinea. And we timed when they occurred 1 10 of a second from each other and probably meant that the objects broke up to three major pieces, each of them associated with a flare and the explosion took ple about 17 kilometers above the ocean surface, so it was really low in the atmosphere. And the pressure exerted on the surface of the object was much larger than all other meteors. All others were subjected to lower pressure before they disintegrated and we concluded that this object was even tougher than ion meteorites in that population, so that was again, an unusual property of this object and we were able to pinpoint the location of the meteor path by using data from a seismometer on the island, that recorded the sonic boom, the explosion sound wave and then just like in the case of the thunder, the sound arrived with some delay because the speed of sound is much lower than the speed of light and from the delay, we were able to infer the distance to the fireball from the seismometer so that narrowed down the path of the meteor. You can see it on the plot on the right side, the box that is shown of. 1 degree, by. 1 degree is the box of the department of defense for the location of this fireball, but using the seismometer data we narrowed down the path of the meteor to the blue and red. The red is simply the intersection of the strip with the department of defense arrow box. And the seismometer and fixed data, the sound data from the explosion. So this is the team of 28 people on the deck of the ship and what you see behind the team is what is called the aframe that we had the cable go from the ship to a sled that we designed, that included magnets on both sides. The sled was lower to the ocean floor which was more than a mile deep and this cable that connected it to the ship went through this aframe, through one of the hooks there and the cable went to out three miles and we tried to skim the ocean floor and collect any magneticarticles that came from the surfacef the meteor when it was exposed to the immense heat from the fireball. So the surface was melted by that heat and drops of material rained down and settled on the ocean floor. We used magnets assuming that the material includes iron. And so, here is a montage of several photos. You can see the sled in the top middle image and also o the right side as we were pulling it out of the ocean and it had magnets on both sid that collected magnetic particl you can see in a minute. At the bottom left and mile, the filming crew that joined us on this expedition, there were 50 of them that wanted to be there and i selected one and they one of i joked every morning at sunrise and in one of th mornings they came over and theyaid that they want to filme and the asked me to go re times longer than usual, it was about nine miles. And the director said, avi it looks like yourerunning. Are you running away from something or towards something . And i said, both. Im running away from some of my colleagues who have very strongpinions without s