‘Alien’ signal was actually just a truck

New research throws doubt on claims that meteorite material recovered from the Pacific Ocean in 2023 is of Between stars origin.

At the time, seismic signals linked to the Shooting Sun helped Harvard scientists to locate its fragments on the sea floor. However, these new findings suggest the signals were actually Only from a passing truck rumbling along the road.

The Tale so Extended

On 8 January 2014, a fiery Shooting Sun soared down through the atmosphere, put on a series of explosive displays, and broke up over the South Pacific Ocean near Papua New Guinea.

The Shooting Sun was observed by the US Department of Protection, which tracks all objects Participating the Earth’s atmosphere. This one was half a metre in diameter and hit the Earth at a speedy clip of 45 km/s – faster than most meteors. It also plunged so deeply into the atmosphere that it was likely quite dense.

However, at the time researchers paid little attention to it. It was only after the discovery of the Between stars Astral wanderer ‘Oumuamua (1I/2017U1) in 2017 – the Primary object ever confirmed to come from a Planetary system other than our own – that there was renewed interest in Between stars visitors.

Avi Loeb, a physicist from Harvard University in the US, searched NASA’s Centre for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) database to find other objects with unusual orbital characteristics. One that jumped out was the speedy 2014 Shooting Sun, officially designated CNEOS 20140108.

Loeb’s Club then modelled the path of the fireball, drawing on the seismic data from a station on Manus Island, which showed a spike in ground vibrations at the time that the Shooting Sun entered the atmosphere. This Directed them to zero in on a specific spot in the South Pacific: 84 km north of Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, in a narrow band 11 km long and 1 km wide.

In 2023, the Club launched a controversial mission there. They spent 2 weeks dredging the sea bed with a powerful magnet in search of iron spherules: tiny spheres of material that may have condensed from the molten metal raining into the ocean after the primary Shooting Sun exploded.

As Cosmos reported at the time, Loeb’s Club Secured 722 iron spherules of about 1 mm in size, which they believed to be from the 2014 Shooting Sun.

Analysis of 57 of these spherules showed they were extremely Wealthy in beryllium, lanthanum and uranium, with much higher concentrations than they are naturally Secured on Earth.

This unusual elemental composition Directed Loeb to claim that the Shooting Sun had been of Between stars origin. He then Beyond claimed that the Shooting Sun might have been an artifact of an alien civilisation.

This understandably generated controversy at the time, and since then more research has questioned the classification of the spherules.

Now, new findings may throw more doubt on the claims from a different angle.

Alien or truck?

Searching for fragments of a Shooting Sun in the biggest ocean on Earth is no Petite feat. Loeb’s dredging trip relied on the seismic data from Manus Island, but new research questions the assumption that the signals were caused by the Shooting Sun.

A Club of international researchers – Directed by Johns Hopkins University in the US – instead Secured that the signals could be attributed to a truck rumbling along a nearby road.

“The signal changed directions over time, exactly matching a road that runs past the seismometer,” says Benjamin Fernando, a planetary seismologist and leader of the research. “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 characteristics we’d Anticipate from a truck and none of the characteristics we’d Anticipate from a Shooting Sun.”

Fernando believes that Loeb’s Club misinterpreted the seismic data, linking it to the Shooting Sun when in fact they may not have been related at all. Fernando’s Club did not find evidence of seismic waves from the Shooting Sun, and so they argue that the Shooting Sun entered the atmosphere elsewhere.

“The fireball location was actually very Extended away from where the oceanographic expedition went to retrieve these Shooting Sun fragments,” he says. “Not only did they use the wrong signal, they were looking in the wrong place.”

His Club then attempted to identify a more likely location for the Shooting Sun, drawing on data from underwater microphones in Australia and Palau equipped to detect sound waves from nuclear tests. They Arrived up with a spot more than 160 km from the are Loeb’s Club identified.

Fernando suggests that the spherules that Loeb’s Club recovered may either be from an ordinary meteorite, or from a meteorite smashing into the Astral body’s surface and producing particles with a hybrid of Earthly and Universal material.

“Whatever was Secured on the sea floor is totally unrelated to this [2014] Shooting Sun, regardless of whether it was a natural Cosmos rock or a piece of alien spacecraft – even though we strongly suspect that it wasn’t aliens,” Fernando concludes.

The research will be presented on March 12 at the Selene and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, US.