by A new study casts more doubt on the supposed success of an interstellar fishing expedition.
On January 8, 2014, a space rock about 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) wide exploded over the western Pacific Ocean. In 2019, Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb and his colleague Amir Siraj determined that the intruder came from outside our solar system, a conclusion that was supported three years later by the US Space Command.
That would make the object, known as CNEOS 2014-01-08, our first known interstellar visitor; it came three years before the arrival of the strange ‘Oumuamua’, which zoomed past Earth in 2017.
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Loeb and his team soon decided to go in search of pieces of the interstellar meteor. In June 2023, they pulled a magnetic sled across the sea floor in the presumed fall zone near Papua New Guinea, hunting for metallic pieces of CNEOS 2014-01-08, or, as the researchers call it, IM1.
Last July, Loeb announced the success of this effort: The expedition collected hundreds of spheroids on a millimeter scale, whose discovery, he wrote, “Opens a new frontier in astronomy, where the study of the what was outside the solar system through a microscope. than a telescope.”
Many other scientists, however, were not convinced. For example, Matthew Genge, a planetary scientist at Imperial College London, said Loeb’s team took an unwarranted leap in linking their spheroids to the January 2014 fireball.
“Meteorite ablation debris was found, but not from an instrumentally observed fireball,” Genge told Space.com via email last July. “A micrometeorite has never come from a separate fireball event, and never will, since it’s impossible.”
Now, a new study adds another layer of doubt. Loeb’s team chose their search area based in part on data collected by a seismic station on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, which detected tremors that appeared to be generated by the meteor’s fiery, superfast journey through Earth’s atmosphere. But those vibrations likely have a much more prosaic reason, according to the new research.
“The signal changed directions over time, aligning directly with a road passing the seismometer,” study leader Benjamin Fernando, a planetary seismologist at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, said in a statement.
“It is very difficult to take a signal and confirm that it is not from something,” Fernando added. “But we can show that many of the signs are like this, and show that they have all the characteristics that we would expect from a truck and none of the characteristics that we would expect from a meteor.”
Neither Fernando nor his team saw a fireball signal in the Manus Island data. But they saw one in measurements made by stations in Australia and the Pacific island nation of Paulu built to receive vibrations from nuclear testing.
And that signal was focused more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) from where Loeb’s team did their meteorite hunt, according to the researchers.
“The location of the fireball was far away from where the oceanographic expedition went to recover these meteor fragments,” Fernando said. “Not only did they use the wrong sign, they were looking in the wrong place.”
It is likely that the expedition found fragments of ordinary detritus, or particles generated when meteorites hit the Earth’s surface and mixed with ground contamination, according to Fernando’s team, who will present the new results next Tuesday (March 12) at a Science Congress Lunar and Planetary in Houston.
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Loeb, however, is sticking to his guns. In a blog post released on Medium today (March 8), the astronomer emphasized that the Manus Island data was secondary in setting the incident search zone. Instead, he and his team relied primarily on information collected by US Department of Defense (DoD) sensors.
“We found that data from other seismometers further away do not provide meaningful constraints, but the new prediction uses the large uncertainties from these other seismometers to claim that the fireball could be anywhere around a large region if we ignore the DoD localization data. ,” Loeb wrote. (The “new preprint” is the Fernando et al. paper, which has not yet been peer reviewed.)
“But why should we selectively ignore data that accompanied the discovery of this meteor?” Loeb added. “The astronomers who dismiss the DoD data and claim that it must be completely wrong should lose sleep at night, because their trust implies that their safety is not secure and that their taxes are being wasted on national security infrastructure unreliable.”
He also pointed out the unusual composition of the recovered spheroids, which his team found significantly enriched in beryllium (Be), lanthanum (La) and uranium (U) compared to the native material of the solar system.
“Our research team’s analysis of 60 elements from the periodic table shows that these spherules are not coal ash and did not come from the crust of the Earth, the moon or Mars,” Loeb wrote in the new blog post. “The ‘BeLaU’-type abundance pattern is unprecedented in the scientific literature and may have originated from differentiation in the magma ocean of an iron-core exoplanet.”
He added that his team is planning another trip to the fall zone, to look for larger pieces of the meteor that could shed more light on its base. So watch out: We probably haven’t reached the end of IM1’s complicated and controversial story.
