In January of 2014, a meteor fell from area off the coast of Papua New Guinea. That may were the top of it, however a number of years later Avi Loeb, a theoretical astrophysicist at Harvard, drew on seismic knowledge from close to the website, appeared for crash stays at the ocean ground and proposed that the stays “may reflect an extraterrestrial technological origin.”
Dr. Loeb has prior to now been accused by means of his friends of untamed hypothesis and sensationalism. Last fall, Benjamin Fernando, a planetary seismologist at Johns Hopkins University, led a group that re-examined the close by seismic indicators and concluded that they weren’t proof of the extraterrestrial, or the rest on the subject of it.
On Tuesday, Dr. Fernando will provide the information intimately at medical convention. Recently, he sat down with The New York Times to preview what his group had discovered. This interview has been edited and condensed for readability.
How did this all get started?
In 2014, a meteor entered the ambience and went “bang.” Sometimes, you listen those meteors on seismometers. Avi Loeb wrote a paper to mention that he’d discovered the seismic sign from this meteor and that he’d used it to find precisely the place the meteor particles fell. And from that, they fixed an expedition and picked stuff up off the ocean ground.
In one paper, Dr. Loeb and a co-author wrote that they “confirmed the fireball location” within the ocean from “the timing of the strong seismic signal.” But you’ve made up our minds that the seismic data wasn’t coming from a meteor. What do you assume it used to be coming from?
A truck.
As in, a hyperspeed alien truck?
No, it used to be an extraordinary truck, like a regular truck riding previous a seismometer. Not being seismologists, the Loeb group could have misunderstood the information. In fact, all they did used to be discover a truck.
And that truck used to be touring the place? In the Milky Way?
No, no, no. The truck used to be touring at the identical island in Papua New Guinea. It’s an extraordinary Earth truck. I assume technically that’s within the Milky Way!
How did you conclude that we’re now not being invaded by means of extraterrestrial beings?
We checked out two weeks of information across the time of this match. We noticed loads of identical indicators like the only Loeb studied. If there are loads, they may be able to’t all be meteors. Of the ones loads of indicators, maximum happen all over sunlight hours. The one Loeb noticed, those we noticed, all occur a lot more all over the day. That’s a sign of anthropogenic noise.
Human-created noise?
Yes.
Then we appeared on the actual sign he used to be having a look at, and it used to be coming from a major highway. Over time, it moved from a major highway within the path of a health facility, after which again to the primary highway. So, from inspecting the information, it appears to be like to us just like the sign is a lot more more likely to have come from a truck turning off the primary highway, riding previous the seismometer close to the health facility after which riding the opposite direction.
There used to be no meteor concerned in any way.
In the realization of your paper, you write that you’ve got “a very high degree of confidence that the purported fragments of the meteor recovered from the seafloor have nothing to do with the fireball” — and due to this fact, that the stuff plucked from the sea ground used to be most certainly simply stuff from Earth, or possibly a bit of of the 1000’s of heaps of meteorites that extend Earth annually. So we shouldn’t concern that extraterrestrial beings are invading our hospitals?
You’d be reasonably fairly justified in now not being worried about extraterrestrial beings invading hospitals.
What’s the larger lesson from all this?
There are two: One, if you wish to do seismic research, it’s supreme for those who test with a seismologist first. The different is, it’s now not extraterrestrial beings.
