1. Abraham "Avi" Loeb is an Israeli and American theoretical physicist who works on astrophysics and cosmology.
23 Facts About Avi Loeb
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Avi Loeb chaired the Department of Astronomy from 2011 to 2020, and founded the Black Hole Initiative in 2016.
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Avi Loeb has published popular science books including Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth and Interstellar: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future in the Stars.
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In 2023, he claimed to have recovered material from an interstellar meteor that could be evidence of an alien starship, which some experts criticized as hasty and sensational, and for which other experts found more Earth-related explanations instead, demonstrating that the accuracy of one of the seismic sensors used by Avi Loeb to locate the alleged interstellar meteor was compromised by interference from ordinary truck traffic.
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Avi Loeb took part in the national Talpiot program of the Israeli Defense Forces at age 18.
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Between 1988 and 1993, Avi Loeb was a long-term member at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where he started to work in theoretical astrophysics.
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In 2009, Broderick and Avi Loeb predicted the shadow of the black hole in the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87, which was imaged in 2019 by the Event Horizon Telescope.
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Together with his postdoc James Guillochon, Avi Loeb predicted the existence of a new population of stars moving near the speed of light throughout the universe.
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Together with his postdoc John Forbes and Howard Chen of Northwestern University, Avi Loeb made another prediction that sub-Neptune-sized exoplanets have been transformed into rocky super-Earths by the activity of Sagittarius A*.
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Together with Paolo Pani, Avi Loeb showed in 2013 that primordial black holes in the range between the masses of the Moon and the Sun cannot make up dark matter.
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Avi Loeb led a team that reported tentative evidence for the birth of a black hole in the young nearby supernova SN 1979C.
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In collaboration with Dan Maoz, Avi Loeb demonstrated in 2013 that biomarkers, such as molecular oxygen, can be detected by the James Webb Space Telescope in the atmosphere of Earth-mass planets in the habitable zone of white dwarfs.
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In 2013, Avi Loeb wrote about the "Habitable Epoch of the Early Universe".
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In 2020, Avi Loeb published a paper about the possibility that life can propagate from one planet to another, followed by the opinion piece "Noah's Spaceship" about directed panspermia.
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In 2024, Avi Loeb delivered a speech in which he declared his view that the Messiah will be an alien who arrives from outer space.
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In public interviews and private communications with reporters and academic colleagues, Avi Loeb has become more vocal about the prospects of proving the existence of alien life.
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In July 2021, Avi Loeb founded The Galileo Project for the Systematic Scientific Search for Evidence of Extraterrestrial Technological Artifacts.
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Avi Loeb made a series of claims about this event, from the meteor being from outside the solar system to its likely area of impact based on, among other things, a seismic signal that occurred around the same time, all culminating in 2023, when Avi Loeb announced that he had found interstellar material on the ocean floor that he asserted came from the meteor and could be remnants of an extraterrestrial starship.
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Monica Grady from the Open University argued that the evidence for Avi Loeb's claims is "rather shaky" and pointed more plausibly to terrestrial pollution.
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In 2006, Avi Loeb was featured in a Time magazine cover story on the first stars, and in a Scientific American article on the Dark Ages of the universe.
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In 2009, Avi Loeb reviewed in a Scientific American article a new technique for imaging black hole silhouettes.
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Avi Loeb has been profiled a number of times, including in Science magazine, Discover, and The New York Times.