by -
Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb searched the ocean floor in the Pacific Ocean last year in search of meteor debris.
-
He said he found a metal sphere that could “indicate an extraterrestrial technological initiative.”
-
A new study now suggests that Loeb may have been looking for meteor debris in the wrong place.
Another study is questioning a Harvard professor’s claim that metallic balls found under the ocean may have been made by foreigners.
Last year, said Avi Loeb, director of the center for computational astrophysics at Harvard spherical metal The Pacific Ocean was found to have been left behind by a meteor that exploded near Earth in 2014.
He said their strange chemical composition may indicate an “extraterrestrial technological origin”.
His claims were criticized by sections of the scientific community who believed Loeb was making wild claims without enough evidence to back them up.
Now researchers believe that Loeb’s expensive expedition looking for evidence of extraterrestrial technology on the sea floor more than 100 miles away may have been misled by seismic data.
Research led by Johns Hopkins University (JHU) said the vibration of a passing truck may have caused a blip on the seismometer Loeb used to locate the crash site.
If true, that means exotic metal balls recovered from the sea floor may not be related to the outer rock, Ben Fernando, a postdoctoral researcher at JHU and lead author of the analysis, told Business Insider in an interview.
“It seems that where they were searching on the seabed was wrong. Therefore, what they recovered from the seabed had nothing to do with what they thought was from this media,” he said.
Pinpointing the crash site
In 2019, Loeb and his team searched databases for unusual, fast-moving meteors. That’s when they came across a meteoric fireball that entered the Earth’s atmosphere in 2014.
The meteor, known as IM1 by the Loeb team, was first spotted by Department of Defense (DoD) sensors. They said it hit the atmosphere at 27 miles per second, a high speed that suggests the meteor came from outside the solar system.
That left Loeb wondering if the 2014 object was an extraterrestrial probe. Loeb wanted to retrieve debris from the object to test his theory.
The DoD suggested a location for the meteor’s impact site, which Loeb and his team used as a baseline to trace a 46-square-mile zone where it might have crashed.
Readings from a nearby seismometer were then used to narrow their search area to a 6 square mile area of interest off the coast of Papua New Guinea.
This is where the expedition searched for spheroids, distinctive metal balls that are often left behind by meteors that crash into the atmosphere.
Loeb’s team scored 805 spherical. A 10th of these, according to their analysis, contained abnormal levels of three metallic elements – beryllium, lanthanum, uranium – and atypical isotopes. This, they said, could point to an interstellar origin.
One hypothesis is that the meteor came from the crust of a planet outside the solar system. Loeb went a step further in the paper, saying that the strange composition could mean that the meteor could be made up of extraterrestrial technology.
Another theory
The JHU-led research, which has not been peer-validated, suggested Loeb and his colleagues misinterpreted the seismic readings taken from Papua New Guinea.
They said it could be explained by the noise of the nearby city, rather than shock waves released by a nearby meteor crash.
“It is probably the signal of a truck that is driving with the seismometer,” said Fernando.
Fernando added that the DoD’s measurements are particularly inaccurate when it comes to indicating the speed and position of near-Earth objects.
To confirm their theory, the JHU-led team tracked data from acoustic measuring devices placed in the area. These car-sized microphones are typically used to detect illicit nuclear tests and are finely tuned to detect explosions in the atmosphere, Fernando said.
This analysis, they said, places the meteor’s location about 120 miles from the area Loeb investigated.
“Basically, I think the big difference is that our team has people who study sound waves, people who are seismologists, and people who study fireballs,” Fernando said.
“And as far as I know, none of those three are on their staff, which is not to say that they are not entitled to publish on this, but it may have caused them to misunderstand or misinterpret those details . they were downloading,” he said.
Loeb disagrees with JHU’s analysis, saying the seismic readings were only used to confirm data from other sources.
“Scientists who are serious about paying attention to new data should study what comes to Earth from outside the solar system, and not be mocked by ill-motivated debunkers,” he said in a post Middle Sunday.
The findings will be presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston on Tuesday.
No stranger to controversy
This is not Loeb’s first attempt at controversy. The professor first made headlines when he said it was reasonable to assume that ‘Oumuamua, an interstellar meteor that passed Earth in 2017, could be a piece of alien technology.
The professor’s hypotheses are ruffling feathers among the scientific community, many of whom believe that scientists should only advance theories if they have a strong evidence base.
Although Loeb is attracting criticism from peers, he is popular among tech tycoons and billionaires, who are backing Project Galileo, Loeb’s new alien technology tracking research institute. Crypto entrepreneur Charles Hoskinson funded the trip to fully recover the spherical.
However, the JHU analysis adds to a body of criticism that has been leveled against the science behind Loeb’s journey.
Some have questioned whether the meteor was interstellar – the US Space Force has weighed in to confirm that they believe it was, but not everyone agrees with that analysis.
Others have also suggested that coal ash runoff contamination from nearby industrial processes could be behind the spheroids’ peculiar composition.
Loeb strongly disagrees with these lies and has advanced arguments against each of them.
As for the truck hypothesis, Loeb said he disagreed with the analysis.
“We found that data from other seismometers further away do not provide meaningful constraints, but the new preprint uses large uncertainties from these other seismometers to claim that the fireball could be anywhere across a large region if we were to ignore DoD localization. details,” he said.
“There is nothing one can say to people who choose to dismiss reliable DoD information,” he said.
Undoubtedly, Loeb and his team are planning another trip to detect fragments from an interstellar meteor.
Read the original article on Business Insider
