Extraordinary row breaks out between Harvard, Johns Hopkins scientists over origin of
A war of words has erupted between scientists at Harvard, Johns Hopkins and elsewhere, over a mystery object some argue came from outside our solar system.
Last June, a research expedition off the coast of Papua New Guinea led by Harvard astrophysicist Dr. Avi Loeb dredged up hundreds of small metal spheres from the Pacific, which he argues came from this object as it melted in midair before impact.
In an op-ed for DailyMail.com last August, Dr. Loeb concluded that ‘the evidence indicates the fragments are of interstellar origin.’
But critics of Dr. Loeb, and his E.T.-hunting Galileo Project at Harvard, continue to challenge these findings — which he has described as a ‘truly historic moment’ of humanity’s first contact with ‘materials from outside our solar system.’
And now the latest test: A new, rival analysis of earthquake-sensor data used to track the object’s 2014 crash argues that this sensor never really did track an interstellar meteor, much less a crashing alien probe, as Dr. Loeb has teased.
This sensor, according to an international team of Galileo’s critics, most likely picked up only the rumblings of a truck.
As critics tell DailyMail.com that the Harvard physicist took his team ‘on a wild goose chase,’ Dr. Loeb has blasted the new study as ‘unprofessional’ and ‘a lie.’
Throughout their two-week Pacific voyage last summer, the Galileo team scoured the seabed for debris from the meteor-like object ‘IM1,’ dragging a deep-sea magnetic sled along the fireball’s last known trajectory. Pictured is Loeb (right)
Dr. Loeb maintains his team only used this seismometer’s ‘earthquake’ data to corroborate Department of Defense satellite data on the likely location and trajectory of the meteor-like object, as it blazed through Earth’s atmosphere in 2014.
‘As my colleague Professor Stein Jacobsen noted,’ Loeb told DailyMail.com, ‘”For them to be right, the Department of Defense satellites picked up the signal of a truck in Papua New Guinea rather than a meteor?”‘
Led by planetary seismologist Dr. Benjamin Fernando at Johns Hopkins, the new research looked for patterns across days and nights of the Manus Island seismometer, named AU MANU, finding similar patterns of noise clearly unrelated to the meteoric fireball
‘The disturbing reality,’ Loeb continued, ‘is that some scientists who pretend to defend evidence-based science, are fast to dismiss new evidence that goes beyond their knowledge base.’
Fernando’s team also used three infrasound sensors to reassess the meteor’s landing site. They believe the magnetic dredging by Loeb’s Galileo team last summer might have been looking for sunken fragments of the IM1 meteor (pictured) in the wrong place
But the authors of the competing new paper were no less critical of the Harvard physicist’s approach.
That group, led by planetary seismologist Dr. Benjamin Fernando at Johns Hopkins, looked for patterns across days and nights of the nearby Manus Island seismometer, AU MANU, near the site of the fireball’s 2014 splashdown in the Pacific.
They report finding many similar patterns of seismic noise, unrelated to the object’s fiery descent.
Their work calls into the question the analysis of that AU MANU data, which Dr. Loeb and one of his former students published last year in the journal Signal.
‘It was an ordinary truck,’ Dr. Fernando told the New York Times. ‘Like a normal truck driving past a seismometer.’
Using directional ‘azimuth’ data from the AU MANU seismometer, Dr. Fernando and his co-authors were able to trace an apparent pattern in the signal.
‘The northward to south-westerly trend of the second (purported meteor) signal is consistent with passage along the road in the opposite direction,’ they wrote in their paper, which has not yet cleared peer-review but is available at Cornell Tech’s pre-print server, arXiv.
These seismic waves picked up by the AU MANU seismometer — as astrophysicist Dr. Steven Desch, a co-author on the new paper, told DailyMail.com — are ‘similar in wave form to dozens of other events that week.’
The group presented their research Tuesday as part of a conference organized by Houston’s Lunar and Planetary Institute.
Loeb’s team searched a patch of the Pacific shown above as a ‘mustard yellow’ square near ‘CNEOS C’ one of two potential impact zone’s estimated by Department of Defense data. New research using infrasound and seismometer sensors suggests a different crash site, ‘IDC’
Three infrasound sensors used by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organisation’s International Monitoring System – ISO4, IS07, and IS37 (above) – were used to calculate this new assessment of the meteor-like object’s crash site
Dr. Fernando’s group also employed data from an array of sensors used to enforce the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty to determine for themselves where the object (be it a meteor or an alien space probe) might have most likely hit the Pacific.
Their triangulation, which used three of those infrasound sensors, suggests that the magnetic dredging by Dr. Loeb’s Galileo team last summer might have been looking for sunken fragments of the object in the wrong place.
‘If he [Loeb] were honest about the seismometer data, he’d have to admit he had no idea where to look.’ Dr. Desch said, ‘but it’s too late for that now.
‘He went on a wild goose chase,’ Dr. Desch opined, ‘now he has egg on his face.’
‘His response to anybody pointing out any of this is to suggest we don’t trust the Department of Defense.’
But, as noted in their paper, Dr. Desch and his colleagues devoted considerable attention to the public Department of Defense meteor data reported to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the object, technically named CNEOS 20140108.
Above a plot of seismic rumbling, as ‘incident velocity power’ from the days before and after the IM1 meteor event (red circle). Clusters of loud and quiet periods, according to Dr. Fernando and his team, conform to loud day and quiet night road traffic. Blue areas are weekends
Harvard’s Galileo team has since recovered many hundreds of unusual iron spheres that they believe are likely from the unidentified object, known as IM1, off the coast of Papua New Guinea last week as part of a $ 1.5 million underwater search mission
His colleague Dr. Fernando noted that the data compiled by the Pentagon for its asteroid-tracking collaborations with NASA, the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), identified two potential impact zones for the ‘fireball’ object, sites dubbed CNEOS B and C.
Loeb’s Galileo team, Dr. Fernando told DailMail.com Monday, only focused on one of these sites, CNEOS C, which was far afield from his teams’ infrasound-based calculation of the impact zone.
‘The best that we can do with the state of the art nuclear monitoring sensors is get an area of about 300,000 square-kilometers, 227,000 square kilometers,’ Dr. Fernando told DailyMail.com Monday.
‘And that’s not because the data is no good. It’s not because the sensors are no good,’ he added.
‘It’s just because it’s an extremely weak signal. And we don’t have an exact model for what the atmosphere was like back in 2014,’ a reference to how weather might have scattered the melting, falling debris.
Dr. Loeb, however, rested his rebuttal on the broad uncertainty and massive square-kilometer surface area determined by his critics’ new research, which he noted, happens to include the area where his team conducted their magnetic dredging for the mystery object’s crashed debris.
‘Ben Fernando and colleagues simply dismissed the Department of Defense data for the localization of the meteor,’ Dr. Loeb wrote DailyMail.com.
‘This is an invalid argument.’
Both Dr. Loeb’s 2023 journal article in Signal, as well as a public announcement from US Space Command, indicate that his Galileo team received corroborative assistance from sensitive DoD satellite data that is not available to the public.
‘It is unprofessional for him to claim that the DoD [Department of Defense] box is incorrect because his much larger region contains other points,’ Loeb said.
‘We went to the DoD box and only used seismometer data to validate the DoD box.’