In January of 2014, a meteor fell from space off the coast of Papua New Guinea. That could have been the close of it, but several several years later on Avi Loeb, a theoretical astrophysicist at Harvard, drew on seismic details from in the vicinity of the web-site, seemed for crash continues to be on the ocean flooring and proposed that the remains “may reflect an extraterrestrial technological origin.”
Dr. Loeb has beforehand been accused by his peers of wild speculation and sensationalism. Last slide, Benjamin Fernando, a planetary seismologist at Johns Hopkins University, led a group that re-examined the nearby seismic indicators and concluded that they have been not proof of the extraterrestrial, or something close to it.
On Tuesday, Dr. Fernando will existing the knowledge in depth at scientific conference. Recently, he sat down with The New York Times to preview what his workforce had uncovered. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
How did this all start off?
In 2014, a meteor entered the ambiance and went “bang.” Sometimes, you hear these meteors on seismometers. Avi Loeb wrote a paper to say that he’d observed the seismic sign from this meteor and that he’d applied it to track down accurately where by the meteor debris fell. And from that, they mounted an expedition and picked things up off the sea ground.
In a person paper, Dr. Loeb and a co-writer wrote that they “confirmed the fireball location” in the ocean from “the timing of the sturdy seismic sign.” But you have established that the seismic details was not coming from a meteor. What do you think it was coming from?
A truck.
As in, a hyperspeed alien truck?
No, it was an standard truck, like a usual truck driving past a seismometer. Not staying seismologists, the Loeb crew may perhaps have misunderstood the details. In fact, all they did was obtain a truck.
And that truck was traveling the place? In the Milky Way?
No, no, no. The truck was traveling on the exact island in Papua New Guinea. It’s an regular Earth truck. I guess technically that is in the Milky Way!
How did you conclude that we’re not becoming invaded by aliens?
We looked at two months of data about the time of this party. We noticed hundreds of related alerts like the a person Loeb analyzed. If there are hundreds, they can’t all be meteors. Of people hundreds of indicators, most take place throughout daylight hrs. The a person Loeb saw, the kinds we observed, all come about substantially much more through the working day. Which is an indicator of anthropogenic noise.
Human-produced sounds?
Certainly.
Then we seemed at the exact signal he was looking at, and it was coming from a major street. Above time, it moved from a primary highway in the route of a medical center, and then again to the main highway. So, from analyzing the info, it seems to us like the signal is significantly a lot more probably to have occur from a truck turning off the primary street, driving earlier the seismometer close to the clinic and then driving the other way.
There was no meteor included by any means.
In the summary of your paper, you publish that you have “a very large degree of self-confidence that the purported fragments of the meteor recovered from the seafloor have nothing at all to do with the fireball” — and as a result, that the stuff plucked from the ocean floor was possibly just things from Earth, or possibly a little bit of the thousands of tons of meteorites that access Earth each calendar year. So we shouldn’t be concerned that aliens are invading our hospitals?
You’d be really reasonably justified in not stressing about aliens invading hospitals.
What is the even bigger lesson from all this?
There are two: One, if you want to do seismic analysis, it is best if you verify with a seismologist initially. The other is, it’s not aliens.