the background fragments that existed everywhere. here is an example for these droplets which are basically metallic marbles that we were able to find after filtering e ack powder. volcanic ash. >> we leave this program to take you live to the u.s. senate for what is scheduled to be a brief session. or watching live coverage on c-span2. the presiding officer: the senate will come to order. the clerk will read a communication to the senate. the clerk: washington, d.c., december 22, 2023. to the senate: under the provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3, of the standing rules of the senate, i hereby appoint the honorable laphonza butler, a senator from the state of california, to perform the duties of the chair. signed: patty murray, president pro tempore.

the presiding officer: under the previous order, the senate stands adjourned until stands adjourned until >> there will be more of these pro forma sessions over the next couple of weeks while the senate is in recess. next both are scheduled january 8 when senators return work will continue in funding the federal government, a two ukraine and border security. watch live coverage of thean senate on c-span2 as we return now to booktv. >> here is one on the left. and when we t look at those, the molten droplets, through the microscope they look beautiful. obviously when we found the first one i was thrilled because i realized when i find an answer in the kchen it means that there are many more ants out

there, and sure enough we found 50 on the ship. when my daughter saw this image, shesked if she can have one of them on a necklace. and i tried to explain these are millimeter in size. we can't read them. they are about the size of a grain of sand. but they look beautiful. and then we put them in files, so he received a a picture ofe delivery room. we delivered those babies, edit set of beds we use files. so you're looking at the delivery room of 50 that were found on the ship. we put them in this white box, and here you can see on the left how we were searching the magnets after every run, this one was on a rainy night. the person who funded the expedition is the one in the

middle, just to my right in the black raincoat. his namee s is charles. you can also see the filming crew basically documenting this work. it was hard work. i didn't sleep for more than three hours at the time because these runs were comin back in the middle of the night at some unexpected hour spirits are basically slept in the conference room and they would call mele every time the sled ce back, so i participated in all ofet the runs, making sure thate collect all the material. and then as we arrived, me, we used the private jet of the funder to get there and come back. but i didn't want to carry the materials in my suitcase from the fear that they might be lost in customs. and so i shipped them in the itcase that you see in black fedex.

and they arrived a few days later to myome. and i realized a few days of delay ar not too much, given that this material tk probably billions of years to travel to earth. so a few days extra, are not a big deal. and then i took this material to the laboratory of my colleague at harvard, stein jacobsen, who has a mass spectrometer. you can see her in front of us. you can seen on the left my summer intern, sophie, who at first arrived just to shout at me and document the project. she wantsts to become a science journalist, then at some point she said, maybe i can help in doing the sites. and i said, that would be fantastic. so i arrange for her a microscope with tweezers, and then we found 50 spherules on

the ship. she found more than 600 pics altogether we have over 700 spherules, and i gave her the title spherules hunter pixel in a matter of a couple of weeks she really increased the reservoir of spherules by more than a factor of ten. and that is very helpful for us. the person you see on the other side is stein jacobsen, that is highly regarded, very conservative i should say, and a very trustworthy geochemist. and i chose to work with him because i could trust anything he does. he's not biased one way or another. so what you see here are the spherules from so these findings. and here are some images that we obtained as soon as we landed in san francisco.

we had to stop at the university of california at berkeley, and they have in the nuclear engineering department, they have an electron microscope, scanning microscope, that looked insidene of the spherules. and you see here what we found. that was amazing that we found smaller spheres inside the biggest fears, sort of like russian dolls. so we found spheres inside spheres and they were embedded on a background of an critic structure. they sort of looked like eggs, the way to understand that is that the small spheres solidified early because they were smaller and then they were engulfed with molten iron that glue them together. and here you see some more,

small spheres inside the bigger sphere. upon arrival to harvard university was to ask my postdoc, laura dominik, to make a map of the field of spheres across the surveyed region. and so what she did is we knew how many spheres were found in each region from sophie's findings. and laura just assigned a yield to each region. she divided the number of retrieved spheres by the amount of mass of background material, volcanic ash that was collected in each share on which we document that. so she gave a weight to each run and then made a map of the region. each of these pixels in the map is roughly half a mile in size, and then what you see are in

purple. oops is a very low yield of the background, far away from the meteor path. that's the purple color. and then a yellow implies twice as many spherules per retrieved mass. so indeed we see three, roughly three hotspots in this heat map where there the yield of spherules was doubled, presumably because of this meteor, because these three yellow regions are to the meteor path and far away we ended up with the standard background yield. and so that gave us assurance that we were at the right spot and having three hotspots, three yellow regions may reflect three flares that were observed from the fireball and there were several runs that went through these yellow regions. for example, run number four,

run 14 and run 13. and in these runs we studied the composition of spherules and found spherules of some unusual type that was never seen before, never reported in scientific literature and not found anywhere else except near the meteor path. so here are some images of spherules this one looks like a soccer ball. and this one looks like a merger of three spheres together. and they solidified before having a chance to become a spherical droplet. all together as a result of the merger. this one was a fairly big spherules found in one of these three rons that passed through a yellow region and so we wanted to examine it first and sustain it. would this ferrell material from this fellow in the mass

spectrometer and this is what he found he came. to me and said, i've never seen anything like it before. we must give it a new name. so what you see in this diagram is the bundle and then the fractional contribution to the weight of this film from different elements in the periodic table, which you see at the bottom, you see the different elements going all the way from lithium up to uranium and the number one represents the standard abundance of solar system material. so anything associated with rocks that are condensed out of the early solar system, these are called contrails is represented by one on this diagram we found that this sphere that they showed you a long the meteor path in the yellow region had beryllium that

is 300 times more abundant by weight relative to solar system materials and the lanthanum that is. 500 times more and uranium that is 600 times more than solar system materials. so we call this composition below or beryllium lanthanum and uranium. and you see that between lanthanum and uranium there are other elements that are much more abundant than in solar system materials. and one can make the same plot. but now it's a function of volatile reality of elements. so in other words, elements on the right side of this diagram ca be lost easily by evaporation during the airbut. as a resulof the fireball heating up the material and, some elements evaporate much more quick than others. so we lose them. and indeed, as we plot the

abundance pattern, as a function of volatility, we see that elements that are volile were indeed lost and that confirm is that this below types ferals here you see five of them superimposed on each other and they seem to have the same abundance pattern, plying that indeed they came from a single event and this event must have been an airburst a fireball, an explosion that got rid of the volatile elements on the right side of this plot. so the volatile elements have abundances less than that of solar system materials because they were lost in the explosion. so where did this abundance pattern, what could it have originated? well, one possibility is that the it's definitely not from earth, the moon or mars, because it doesn't resemble those

abundances that we find there in those environments. it most likely came from outde the solar system, but it could be natural in origin. and we mentioned in our paper that just came out a couple of weeks ago that indeed it could have been a planet that had a magma ocean, a lava. molten lava planet, and the earth's started this way. it was bombarded early on in its history by big objects that collided with earth during the heavy bombardment and the moon formed out of one of these collisions. so the earth started as a molten lava planet, and the moon was also an ocean magma. and mars started this way as well. except that the composition we see now on the surface of these

objects does not resemble these below spheres. nevertheless, the earth has an iron core and some elements have affinity to iran, so they sink during the molten lava phase and they leave behind other elements that we find enhanced in the below abundance pattern. so it's possible that the the origin of this object was a molten lava planet around the star, far away outside the solar system. that's one natural origin for it. but it's also possible that these elements were enhanced for a technological reason, because one of the scientists said to me that after we posted the paper that lanthanum and molybdenum are used in semiconductorss substrates and uranium, we all know is used for energy production in nuclear fission

reactors and beryllium is enhanced, presumably as a result of the impact of cosmic rays, because it's made by separation of heavier nuclei and in the interstellar space, the flux of cosmic rays is much larger than in the inner solar system, which is protected from cosmic race by the heliosphere. and we also looked at isotopes of iron. then, for example, iron 57 relative to iron 56 and the all solar system rocks are in, in a small region of this parameter space and below spheres were way to power from this region. and so that indicated that we are not looking at material that came from earth definitely not so so the question remaas