PNG meteor's potentially alien origins to be investigated

An expedition is set to investigate a meteor that crashed off Papua New Guinea in 2014, the first interstellar object to reach our planet - and the mission's lead says it could reveal evidence of life beyond the stars.

Harvard professor and astrophysicist Abraham 'Avi' Loeb told Breakfast the meteor was unusually tough and could be made of an artificial material, meaning someone or something outside of our solar system created it.

"The explosion of this object when it came near the lower atmosphere of the Earth implied that it's tougher than iron," he said.

"In fact it's tougher than all the space rocks we had seen before, and together with my student, we concluded it came from outside the solar system - so why would the first object from outside the solar system ever discovered be so unusual?

"So we said, well, maybe it's artificial in origin, maybe it's a spacecraft just like the interstellar probes that we sent out."

New Horizons is an interplanetary space probe launched by NASA in 2006. It has travelled farther than any other spacecraft.

Loeb said that, if New Horizons collided with another planet which had life on it, it would appear like a meteor to them.

"It would explode in the atmosphere of that planet and if there is an astronomer over there, they might ask: 'What is this object? Is it a rock or artificial?'

"What we are aiming at is to go to the place where the explosion took place and search for the fragments left over, because we want to examine them to figure out the composition of the object," he said.

"I already told the curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City that, if we find any gadget at the bottom of the ocean, I'll bring it for display because for us it would represent modernity. The senders sent it a long time ago, for them it's ancient history."

When asked about the likelihood of the object being alien, Loeb was clear it's a possibility worth investigating.

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"For 70 years we've been searching for for radio signals, and that's just like waiting for a phone call.

"But there is another method ... and that is to search our mailbox for any packages."