Oh it's Avi Loeb, head of the astronomy department at Harvard. Here's a youtube about what his deal is, by an astronomer who studied astronomy through postdoc level and then left for industry and doing some youtubes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY985qzn7oI
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 22.5 ms ] threadhttps://graysci.com/chapter-two/make-your-best-shot/
https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/Interstellar_Expedition.p...
Note: That is not the Avi Loeb paper, but it is reported to have been submitted about his work.
A diary of that research trip is here
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/the-im1-spherules-from-the-pacif...
Related Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNEOS_2014-01-08