On January 8, 2014, a fireball from space crashed into the sea north of Manus Island, off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Its location, speed and brightness were recorded by US Government sensors.
That data remained there until Avi Loeb, a theoretical astrophysicist at Harvard University, and Amir Siraj, then a college student, stumbled upon it in 2019.
In June, Loeb led an expedition to retrieve fragments of the fireball from the seafloor. On June 21, he claimed to have succeeded. And discoveries like that, he says, may be the way to find evidence of extraterrestrial life.
“Not biological creatures,” Loeb said. “Most likely it is a technological device with artificial intelligence.”
However, many astronomers view the announcement as the latest example of an outlandish statement by Loeb. His pronouncements distort the public perception of how science really works, they say.
Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University, said several of his colleagues refused to review Loeb’s work.
Loeb has been captivated by the search for aliens ever since an interstellar object called Oumuamua sped past our planet in 2017. He argued it could be an artifact of intelligent life.
Loeb also began studying the catalog of fireballs at NASA. That led to the object being detected in 2014. From its direction and speed at impact, 45 kilometers per second, Loeb and Siraj concluded that it had been moving too fast for it to be anything gravitationally tied to our Sun. meant it must have been interstellar.
Loeb’s ocean expedition was funded with $1.5 million from Charles Hoskinson, a cryptocurrency entrepreneur, and organized via EYOS Expeditions.
For two weeks, the team dragged a sled equipped with magnets, cameras and lights across the seabed, retrieving scores of glowing beads, each less than a millimeter in diameter. Preliminary analyzes showed that these spherules were made primarily of iron.
Iron is not commonly found in such waters, said Maurice Tivey, a marine geophysicist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who was not involved with the expedition.
The roundness of the recovered fragments suggests that they were once streamlined. “So I think he’s found parts of it,” Tivey said.
Skepticism erupted at a recent Asteroid, Comet, and Meteor Conference. There, Desch argued that if the fireball had moved as fast as reported, the meteor would have burned up in the atmosphere. Or only a milligram would have survived and spread over tens of square kilometers.
Loeb has sent the spherules to various laboratories for analysis and dating. Spherules older than our solar system, or with a distinctive isotopic signature, must be interstellar.
At the University of California at Berkeley, Loeb conducted some of the first inspections. Early tests revealed uranium and lead, which can be used to estimate the age of the material. Two of the spherules appear to be as old as the universe itself, he says.
But even if the fireball had originated from another cosmic neighborhood, more evidence is needed to prove that the spherules are linked to extraterrestrial life.
Loeb’s team intends to search for bigger relics from the fireball this year. And in 2024, the team says it will visit a site in the waters off Portugal in search of a second meteorite that Loeb and Siraj have said is of interstellar origin.
“He could be wrong, but we’ll never know unless we see,” said Rob McCallum, co-founder of EYOS Expeditions.
By: KATRINA MILLER
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6827632, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-07-31 19:20:06
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