Avi Loeb

It was a comet.

but it had similar abundances of nickel and iron.

The only place where we found before much more nickel than iron is in alloys that we produce industrially.

For example, for aerospace applications, nickel alloys have a lot of nickel, no iron.

So maybe the skin of this object is industrially produced.

That was my suggestion.

But what the authors of these papers said is,

Maybe nature is capable of going through the same chemical pathway of producing nickel without iron as we do in our industries.

So they made the conjecture that this carbonyl pathway, which is well known in the industry world, carbonyl is the pathway, the name of the pathway,

They said, well, maybe this carbon in pathway happens in nature.

We have never seen it before, but that is their explanation.

No, it's not an alloy.

It's just that somehow the nickel gets released, the iron gets suppressed.

Nobody would argue that you could sort of separate nickel from iron because they're produced together in exploding stars.

And in fact, the composition of the sun has more iron than nickel, 10 times more by mass.

And so...

We just don't know, as in the case of this jet that I was mentioning, which recently turned into a tale now over the month of September.

And also, why was it changing structure is not clear.

There are lots of anomalies.

There was also a very negative polarization of the light.