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Another study has throw away doubt on a Harvard professor ’s title that he discovered lilliputian metallic balls made by alien at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean .
In 2023,Avi Loeb , director of Harvard University ’s computational astrophysics marrow , claimed he had ground several metal spherules left behind by a meteor that exploded over the Western Pacific Ocean in 2014 and that their strange composition " may reflect an extraterrestrial technical origin . "
A close-up of an ‘anomalous’ metal spherule pulled from the Pacific Ocean in June 2023.
Scientists cursorily pushed back at Loeb ’s assertions — which he made prior to publishing any peer - reviewed research on the spheres — articulate that he miss grounds to back them up and that several subject indicated the sphereslikely came from human - made defilement .
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Now , a new field of study that will be present Tuesday ( March 12 ) at theLunar and Planetary Science Conferencein The Woodlands , Texas , has tot more fuel to critic ' skepticism . It claims that a seismometer first thought by Loeb and his colleagues to record the meteoroid ’s fiery passageway may have instead picked up a grumble from a passing truck , disastrously mislead the investigator in their hunt for the meteoroid ’s leftover .
" The fireball location was really very far away from where the oceanographic excursion went to retrieve these meteor fragments , " lead authorBenjamin Fernando , a planetary seismologist at Johns Hopkins University , said in a statement . " Not only did they use the wrong signaling , they were look in the faulty place . "
Loeb and his team first found the shooting star in 2019 , after scouring database for space rocks that had arrived at Earth via unusual trajectories . dub IM1 after its breakthrough , the meteoroid appeared to be move too fast to have come from within oursolar system , conduce Loeb to inquire if it was a probe from an alien ballistic capsule .
Loeb turned to meter reading from a seismometer that appear to track the meteor ’s perfervid stock — station it within a 6 - straight - statute mile ( 16 square klick ) area of coast just off Papua New Guinea ’s Manus Island . There , Loeb found 805 microscopic spherules , a fraction of which contained strange elements that could indicate they originate from outside thesolar system , harmonise to the team ’s analysis .
But after analyzing the signaling Loeb used , Fernando said it ’s much more likely it came from a pass away hand truck than an alien spacecraft or interstellar shooting star .
" The signal changed directions over time , exactly matching a route that runs past the seismometer , " Fernando said . " It ’s really difficult to take a signal and confirm it is not from something . But what we can do is show that there are lots of signals like this , and show they have all the characteristic we ’d await from a truck and none of the characteristic we ’d wait from ameteor . "
hire data point from stations in Australia and Palau designed to notice the sounds made by nuclear tests , the researcher propose that the location Loeb and his squad should have investigated was 100 mile ( 160 kilometers ) from the web site they chose . As for the spherule they discover , the new sketch claims they likely add up from average meteorites hitting Earth .
" Whatever was regain on the seafloor is entirely unrelated to this meteor , disregardless of whether it was a natural space rock or a spell of alien spacecraft — even though we strongly distrust that it wasn’taliens , " Fernando said .
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Loeb has repeat down in response , writing in apost on Mediumthat the team used the seismometer data only after finding their search area and that the primary indicators they used were sensors installed by the U.S. Department of Defense ( DOD ) .
" The stargazer who discount the DoD data and argue that it must be exclusively wrong should lose slumber at night because their suspicion implies that their safety is not secured and their taxes are wasted on an unreliable home security infrastructure , " Loeb drop a line .
