Evrim Yazgin
Cosmos science journalist
Harvard University physicist Avi Loeb has responded to those who have cast doubt over his claim that metallic spherules retrieved from the seafloor near Papua New Guinea are from a meteorite of interstellar origin.
Loeb has even claimed that the fragments’ unusual chemical makeup could be evidence of an alien civilisation from another stellar system.
A fiery meteor broke up over the South Pacific Ocean on 8 January 2014, tracked by the US Department of Defense. Loeb’s team launched a controversial mission in 2023 to recover it. But researchers led by John Hopkins University scientists have questioned seismic data linked to the meteorite.
As Cosmos reported yesterday, the John Hopkins-led research says that the seismic signal was not caused by the meteorite at all, but by a truck passing by the seismic station on Manus Island where the signals were detected.
Loeb, however, has responded, pointing Cosmos to a preprint paper, saying that “the expedition to retrieve the materials … was not dictated by the [seismic] data studied by Fernando et al. (2024)”.
He says the expedition’s location is in line with a “location box” determined by an assessment of the meteor’s velocity and trajectory by NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) and that the seismometer data was only considered to “test consistency” with the CNEOS location box.
In any case, experts are sceptical that Loeb’s team uncovered material from an interstellar object. They say it is more likely that its composition is the result of pollution from Earth-based materials.
While Loeb says his team’s analysis of the chemistry of the spherules rules this out, other physicists say that proof of interstellar origin would be in dating the material and finding that it is older than the Sun.
