Alien technology could be in the ocean, an astronomer thinks. Many reject the idea: NPR

Eight years ago, a meteor thought to be 2 feet long entered Earth’s atmosphere at over 100,000 miles per hour before exploding into tiny hot fragments and falling into the South Pacific Ocean.

Some scientists believe it originated in another star system, making it the first known interstellar object of its size to impact Earth.

Now Professor Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics is planning an expedition to retrieve fragments of the meteor from the ocean floor. By analyzing the debris, he hopes to determine the origins of the object, even going so far as to make the extraordinary suggestion that it could be a technological object created by extraterrestrials.

Still, astronomers are suspicious of his claims, citing a lack of data on the object and insufficient evidence to support his bold guesses about extraterrestrial life.

What is he looking for?

The object Loeb was looking for, designated CNEOS 2014-01-08, was detected in 2014 by a network of satellites used to monitor the skies for potentially dangerous asteroids. Using data released by NASA, Loeb and Amir Siraj, then an undergraduate astrophysics student at Harvard University, first suggested that the object came from outside our solar system in 2019.

“It was moving very fast, about 40 kilometers per second when it exploded in the lower atmosphere,” Loeb said. “And from there, we can deduce that it was moving way too fast to be tied to the sun.”

Loeb and Siraj submitted a paper making their point to a peer-reviewed astronomy journal. The article was rejected because their data was incomplete. Some of the data relied on sightings of classified missile detection systems, making Loeb and Siraj’s estimates of the object’s speed impossible for examiners to verify.

But in April, a note released by US Space Command seemed to confirm that the object came from another star system.

Now Loeb is launching a $1.5 million expedition to retrieve pieces of the meteor from the ocean floor. Based on Department of Defense data, Loeb focused his search on an area of ​​nearly 40 square miles.

“It’s like mowing the lawn,” Loeb said. “We plan to use a sled with a magnet that will pick up a very thin layer on top of the mud.”

He says testing the composition of the object could determine if it resembles those found in our solar system.

“There is also the possibility that it is made of an alloy that nature does not assemble, and that would imply that the object is technological,” Loeb said. “If you ask what my wish is, if it is indeed of artificial origin, and there was a component of the object that survived, and if there are buttons on it, I would like to press it .”

Other astronomers are very skeptical

Many astronomers dismiss the idea that the object is technological, saying there are much simpler and much more likely natural explanations. And some are reluctant to conclude that the meteor even came from outside our solar system.

The biggest problem is the data itself. It is difficult to observe small fast moving objects in the atmosphere.

“If you’re a satellite and you’re looking at a meteor…you can get the movement from left to right, but it’s hard to tell if it’s heading towards you or away from you,” said said Steve Desch, professor of astrophysics at Arizona State University. He said that would make estimates of the object’s speed prone to error, making it difficult to confirm whether it was interstellar.

The data is also “sanitized,” Desch said. Because some of the data comes from a network that includes classified military satellites, the available data is stripped of information that could reveal US defense capabilities, such as error bars that indicate measurement accuracy.

Astronomer Robert Weryk studies near-Earth objects detected by the Pan-STARRS telescope, and he said the Space Command memo was not enough to draw definitive conclusions about the object’s origins.

“I kind of have to take it with a grain of salt,” he said. “I understand why they’re not releasing more information, but I think it would be essential…to come to a conclusion that this object is interstellar.”

“I think there’s reason to think it could be of interstellar origin,” said Meenakshi Wadhwa, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University. “[But I would] add the caveat that none of the work to date on this can be found in the peer-reviewed literature. … The science hasn’t really been checked to the extent that I’d like it to be checked.”

Finally, Loeb’s critics point to the difficulties of the expedition itself.

“It’s what I would generously call a dodgy plan,” said Ethan Siegel, an astrophysicist and science communicator who spoke critical Loeb’s past claims about extraterrestrials.

Siegel and Desch agree that there are too many variables — atmospheric winds and ocean currents, for example — to confidently identify a search location. The search team would be looking for “only grams of material” after it “has been spinning on the ocean floor for years,” Desch said.

“If you want to invest in renting a submarine and going down to the bottom of the ocean for…a wild goose hunt, you can do that,” Siegel said. “If you want to take all your money and throw it in the middle of the ocean, you can do that too.”

Loeb is not discouraged. For him, the expedition is a chance to go down in history. If Loeb finds pieces of the meteor and it is of interstellar origin, it could be the first time humans have got their hands on an interstellar object of its size.

In response to his detractors, Loeb describes his work as “interstellar archaeology”.

“What I mean is that if a cave dweller found a cell phone, they would say the cell phone is a rock of a type that we have never seen before,” he said. .

“And the only way to find out is to press a few buttons on that cell phone and realize that it’s recording your voice, it’s recording your image. Then it’ll be clear that it’s not rock. “