Has Avi Loeb Found the Remains of an Interstellar Object? (vice.com) 50
Motherboard reports:
Scientists are currently searching for the submerged remains of an interstellar object that crashed into the skies near Papua New Guinea in January 2014 and probably sprinkled material from another star system into the Pacific Ocean, according to an onboard diary by Avi Loeb, the Harvard astronomer who is leading the expedition. The effort, which kicked off on June 14, aims to recover what is left of the otherworldly fireball using a deep-sea magnetic sled.
The team has already turned up "anomalous" magnetic spherules, steel shards, curious wires, and heaps of volcanic ash, but has not identified anything that is unambiguously extraterrestrial — or interstellar — at this point. However, Loeb is optimistic that the crew will identify pieces of Interstellar Meteor 1 (IM1), the mysterious half-ton object that struck Earth nearly a decade ago, which he thinks could be an artifact, or "technosignature," from an alien civilization...
The fireball that sparked the hunt smashed into the atmosphere on January 8, 2014, and was detected by NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), which keeps track of extraterrestrial impacts using a network of sensors around the world. Years later, Loeb and his student, Amir Siraj, concluded that the meteor's high velocity at impact suggested that it was interstellar in origin, a hypothesis that was ultimately supported by the United States Space Command using classified sensor data.
Today Loeb posted on Medium that "by now, we have 25 spherules from the site of the first recognized interstellar meteor," with a cumulative weight of about 30 milligrams — estimated to be one part in ten million of the original fireball's mass: The success of the Interstellar Expedition constitutes the first opportunity for astronomers to learn about interstellar space by using a microscope rather than a telescope. It opens the door for a new branch of observational astronomy.
Updates about the expedition are running on the Mega Screen in New York's Times Square, Motherboard reports. And Loeb writes that "If further analysis of the 50 milligrams retrieved from IM1's site will inform us that IM1's composition requires a technological origin, we will know that we are not alone."
He also shared an email that responded to his online diaries: I had a heart attack four weeks ago and am now in rehab. I read your IM1 diary every day and it always gives me new courage to face life. There are still so many things to discover and I want to live long enough to see some of them. I wish you and your team all the best.
The team has already turned up "anomalous" magnetic spherules, steel shards, curious wires, and heaps of volcanic ash, but has not identified anything that is unambiguously extraterrestrial — or interstellar — at this point. However, Loeb is optimistic that the crew will identify pieces of Interstellar Meteor 1 (IM1), the mysterious half-ton object that struck Earth nearly a decade ago, which he thinks could be an artifact, or "technosignature," from an alien civilization...
The fireball that sparked the hunt smashed into the atmosphere on January 8, 2014, and was detected by NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), which keeps track of extraterrestrial impacts using a network of sensors around the world. Years later, Loeb and his student, Amir Siraj, concluded that the meteor's high velocity at impact suggested that it was interstellar in origin, a hypothesis that was ultimately supported by the United States Space Command using classified sensor data.
Today Loeb posted on Medium that "by now, we have 25 spherules from the site of the first recognized interstellar meteor," with a cumulative weight of about 30 milligrams — estimated to be one part in ten million of the original fireball's mass: The success of the Interstellar Expedition constitutes the first opportunity for astronomers to learn about interstellar space by using a microscope rather than a telescope. It opens the door for a new branch of observational astronomy.
Updates about the expedition are running on the Mega Screen in New York's Times Square, Motherboard reports. And Loeb writes that "If further analysis of the 50 milligrams retrieved from IM1's site will inform us that IM1's composition requires a technological origin, we will know that we are not alone."
He also shared an email that responded to his online diaries: I had a heart attack four weeks ago and am now in rehab. I read your IM1 diary every day and it always gives me new courage to face life. There are still so many things to discover and I want to live long enough to see some of them. I wish you and your team all the best.
How can they be sure they have bits of the meteori (Score:1)
Re:How can they be sure they have bits of the mete (Score:4, Interesting)
There must be many ways small spheres of once molten metal could end up on the sea bed. E.g. other meteorites, burned up space debris, shipboard fires, war related explosions etc.
Most likely the composition of the spheres. X amount of iron or other elements with certain isotopes which don't occur on Earth. Or possibly their location. Nothing else is around the area where they were found that they could have come from.
Just guessing. I'm not a scientist, but I have stayed at a Holiday Inn Express.
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This comes from Avi Loeb [youtube.com]. Don't take it seriously.
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As a field geologist, I wouldn't take an astrophysicist/ mathematician's assertions about the origin of something from the seabed too strongly though. But when I read this story as a submission (and up-voted it, IIRC), Loeb himself wasn't making much of the purported origin of this material. He doesn't need to - the "popular press" will do that for him.
Kudos to him for taking a portable XRF on the expedition, those things
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Didn't America and Japan fight a war in that general area about 75 years ago? That (or one of it's side-effects) would be the first port of call for attributing a random bit of metal on the seabed.
What thy need to do is repeat the search programme 100km from the meteorite's inferred landing zone, and see if they get much different.
Blog has more info (Score:5, Informative)
There must be many ways small spheres of once molten metal could end up on the sea bed. E.g. other meteorites, burned up space debris, shipboard fires, war related explosions etc.
He posts more information on his blog.
The location is not in a shipping lane, so is likely not to be a shipwreck. The spheres are in the area of the meteorite impact and not adjacent areas, so likely not generic ocean bed trash, and so on. However, this is cutting edge science and not all the evidence has been gathered, and not a lot of competing theories have been put forward.
Altogether, in our ten Runs of the magnetic sled, we have encountered steel shards only in Runs 6 and 7, delineating a fairly isolated geographic area not on a major shipping lane. These shards are not likely associated with a wreck because the spatial distribution is bigger than a wreck, and not trash or we would have seen it elsewhere.
It's interesting to see the process play out, though.
So far he's been dragging magnets (with cameras) along the ocean floor. He's planning on diving to the sea bed and sluicing up remains into a filter to capture non-magnetic material.
Of specific interest was a wire, 8 millimeters long, made of Manganese and Platinum. This type of wire is consistent with terrestrial PtMn laboratory electrodes, although the precise combination is not something available for purchase on Earth.
I was worried about possible contamination from the ship deck. A member of the expedition crew swiped the floor of the Silver Star’s deck with magnets and brought the results to me. There was nothing there that looked like [the wire]
Might be nothing, might be some natural phenomena, but might be an actual wire of terrestrial origin.
If we can get isotope analysis of the recovered elements, it might be conclusive.
Time will tell.
Re: Blog has more info (Score:1)
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Loeb is a serious scientist
Loeb is NOT a serious scientist. He's a podcast whore that tries to sell his bullshit books.
Wait,.. -facepalm- ... he IS a serious scientist.,..
Re: Blog has more info (Score:2)
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Back during WW II, shipping convoys often steamed on a zig-zag path to make it harder for submarines to find them, and if found, get into a position where an attack was possible. Depending on how broad the turns were between legs, this could easily have taken the convoy outside the normal shipping lanes as safety was far more important than transit time. If the location he's searching is close enough to a lane, it's possible tha
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My grandfather got to Murmansk doing this. Never talked about it until just before the Millennium, and never told me how insane he thought I was to go to work at sea. His life at sea was something he never wanted to remember after being de-mobbed.
As soon as they left the marshalling area, they got the hell out of regular (pre-war) shipping lanes and stayed right out of them until they had no
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I think in this case, Occam's Razor cuts a bit like "If it's plausible that humans made it, and no evidence to the contrary, then assume humans made it." The wire is anecdotal evidence. I'd be willing to consider it if more things were found that somehow make sense with that wire. Otherwise, I will be inclined to believe it was from a piece of lab equipment, possibly decommissioned and headed for the scrapyard.
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After 30+ years of looking at sludge from seabeds and oil wells, I'd say the wire is an unspectacular fragment sheared off one piece of metal by another piece of metal moving across it. Exactly what you'd expect from two ships coming into contact with each other. Or less dramatically, the hardened steel "box flange" of a shipping container scraping across the "deck furniture" of a ship in heavy weather. Or maybe, a cable-fitting scraping against a pulle
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His blog has more info (Score:1)
Ya, this feels like clickbait and the fact that Medium and Vice are the sources makes that even more likely. This is bad science journalism. I can't believe Vice is still considered an acceptable source.
His blog [avi-loeb.medhttps] is much more interesting, is an easy read, and has the information you want.
Of the 19 samples, one is two spheres melted together. With some simple assumptions he deduces that the spheres formed within 100 meters of the meteor fireball.
Really interesting stuff.
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See previous comment about micrometeorites collected from your local multi-storey car park. A routine find to make.
Avi Loeb is a crank. Take it with a grain of salt. (Score:5, Informative)
He's the guy pushing the "'Oumuamua technosignature hypothesis" [wikipedia.org] - i.e. it's aliens.
Only in his case it is apparently not the belief in aliens but ego - he is a VERY BIG DEAL in the astro-cosmo-sciency community.
an Israeli-American theoretical physicist who works on astrophysics and cosmology. Loeb is the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University.
He had been the longest serving chair of Harvard's Department of Astronomy (2011â"2020), founding director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative (since 2016) and director of the Institute for Theory and Computation (since 2007) within the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.[1][2][3][4][5][6]
Loeb is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society, and the International Academy of Astronautics. In July 2018, he was appointed as chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy (BPA)[7] of the National Academies, which is the Academies' forum for issues connected with the fields of physics and astronomy, including oversight of their decadal surveys.
In June 2020, Loeb was sworn in as a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) at the White House.[8][9]
In December 2012, Time magazine selected Loeb as one of the 25 most influential people in space.[10] In 2015, Loeb was appointed as the science theory director for the Breakthrough Initiatives of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation.
In 2018, he attracted media attention for suggesting that alien space craft may be in the Solar System, using the anomalous behavior of ÊOumuamua as an example.[11]
In 2019, and together with his Harvard undergraduate student, Amir Siraj, Loeb reported discovering a meteor that potentially originated outside the Solar System.[12]
He can't be wrong. He is always right. You are wrong.
I.e. Dude's ego doesn't allow him to admit that he's been wrong, so... lately... he's been seeing aliens and objects "that potentially originated outside the Solar System" - everywhere.
Cause... You know... If he's proven right about one of those things, he'll be tacitly proven right about all other things.
He will redeem his earlier claims and make them true retroactively. Or at least, potentially not untrue.
And there's more. [youtube.com]
Re: Avi Loeb is a crank. Take it with a grain of s (Score:1)
Yeah, I got a pretty solid whiff of that from his blog posts.
He is definitely hyping the alien thing - he describes some of the microscopic particles (which he calls spherules to sound more exotic) as looking like an alien emoji. That's ridiculous and a way to draw in the credulous.
This sounds more like SEO and clickbait trolling than any sort of scientific assessment.
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He's the Giorgio Tsoukalos of astronomy/astrophysics haha.
"I don't know so it must be aliens"
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So no, those spheres and wires are with high probability not alien made. If you've ever been to a geological collection, you will notice that there is so many so crazy stuff out there, that some magnetic spheres and some wire-like metal threads don't even start to astonish you. And an alloy with iron, but without nickel points to a chemical process of slow purification, where a weak acid has washed away the nickel, but not the iron. Many
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For some reason he got really excited about Oumuamua being a spaceship. Probably he read Rendezvous with Rama a few times and didn't ask any non-theoretical physicists or astronomers about alternatives. Instead of just taking the laughs he's decided to triple down.
He's also in his 60s. That's still pretty young, and Loeb doesn't have a Nobel prize, but maybe he's developed a touch of Nobelitis anyway.
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Yeah, but what if he is right ?
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He'll only ever be "right" in the sense that a stopped clock may be displaying the current time when you look at it. We'd still need competent analysis from someone more level-headed and less eager to "discover" interstellar objects everywhere.
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The 'wire' looked interesting, but there's no proof that it was manufactured...I can think of more than a few ways it could have come to be through natural interactions with other objects. It looked more like a shard that was peeled off through impact with something else.
Still, fun to think about and I'm not saying he's wrong, just that I'm unconvinced so far.
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Absolutely.
Looking out for, and noting changes in the abundance of such, used to be part of my day job. Move 5km of steel pipe through 4km of steel pipe, then rotate the two pipes with respect to each other, and you see these on a regular basis. See them suddenly appear more often (2 or 3 per 100gm of rock instead of 1) and if you didn't report this to your superior (which later, would be me) and you may lose your job. Or a
A heart attack? Riiiiight... (Score:1)
"I had a heart attack four weeks ago"... smells fishy to me. Better have someone test your food from now on.
Early 60's median age for first heart attack (Score:2)
Early-to-mid 60's is the median age for the first heart attack in men.
Not every man has a heart attack, but if you have one, that is typically when it happens.
So contrary to the snark, not a rare occurrence.
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That was an e-mail from one of his readers.
Reading comprehension much?
Crackpot (Score:3, Informative)
Re: Crackpot (Score:2)
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More like starts with a conclusion and then declares the evidence found (and you must be trying to hide something if you question the declaration).
no (Score:1)
n/t
Give me a break. (Score:2)
I stopped reading at "technosignature, from an alien civilization."
Spoiler alert (Score:1)
Ohh (Score:1)
that's what happened to my turd. Although, I really shouldn't have eaten my airpod that day. I was hungry.
No (Score:4, Informative)
Archetypal instance of Betteridge's law of headlines.
How do these cranks get funding? (Score:4, Interesting)
Serious question, I need to know. There are definitely aliens in my bedroom, I just need a few million to build the right equipment to prove it.
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Serious question, I need to know. There are definitely aliens in my bedroom, I just need a few million to build the right equipment to prove it.
They only come while you are sleeping and know how to avoid detection by few million dollar alien detectors. I'm afraid you'll need a few billion to detect them.
Interesting paper by same guy on panspermia (Score:3)
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Contradiction in terms.
Even if you could prove, tomorrow, absolutely, that panspermia can happen, that does precisely nothing to solve the difficult question of "how did life originate?"
All you've done is move the locus from "our best estimate of the conditions on Earth a few hundred million years before the oldest terrestrial fossil (and possibly elsewhere)" to "practically anywhere, under practically any conditions". Which is worse than useless.
universal answer (Score:2)
No.
Probability... (Score:2)
However, Loeb is optimistic that the crew will identify pieces of Interstellar Meteor 1 (IM1) ... which he thinks could be an artifact, or "technosignature," from an alien civilization.
With the same probability we can assume that the pieces come from his mothers left testicle...
Fuck you and your fantasies, Avi.