An Israeli scientist proves his outlandish theory about the interstellar meteor is down-to-earth

Israeli-born Harvard University science professor Avi Loeb’s 60th birthday last June was marked by both celebration and apology.

For the past three years, Loeb – a prominent but controversial theoretical physicist – and his assistant Amir Siraj have been attempting to publish a paper on a mysterious half-meter meteor that crashed off Papua New Guinea in 2014. Loeb and Siraj claim it to be the first recorded object to be of interstellar origin.

Their paper was rejected, Siraj wrote in a recent Scientific American article, because the government database through which he and Loeb first learned about the meteor did not contain a measure of the uncertainty — that is, the projected error rate in their calculations about the meteor . The paper was instead published on arXiv, a non-peer-reviewed website for scholarly articles.

The duo later obtained supporting data from two scientists at Los Alamos and from the anonymous analyst who originally tracked the meteor. But it wasn’t official government confirmation of interstellar origin. That finally came this spring, in an April 6 US Space Command tweet that put the meteor on a very short list of three verified interstellar objects, joining Comet Borisov and the 2017 headline-making object labeled ‘Oumuamua, Hawaiian for “traveller,” that Loeb had posited was not just interstellar but possibly extraterrestrial technology.

“I was confident from the start,” Loeb told the Times of Israel of the meteor. “Reviewers of the newspaper had doubts. With the [Space Command memo]the government says it’s 99.999 percent based on the full data it has [confirmed].”

In several articles, he has expressed his excitement at the possibilities of discovering interstellar objects – that is, objects that come from regions of space beyond the solar wind generated by the Sun.

“The fundamental question,” he wrote in a Medium post on April 13, “is whether any interstellar meteor could point to a composition that is clearly man-made? Better still, some technological components would survive the impact. My dream is to push a few buttons on a working device made off-world.”

Suffice it to say that Loeb has pushed quite a few buttons — metaphorically speaking — within the scientific community over the years. Among his critics is Simon Goodwin, a professor of theoretical astrophysics at the University of Sheffield, who tweaked Loeb for his comments about ‘Oumuamua in a piece for The Conversation last year. Goodwin bemoaned the likelihood that a loner would find an extraterrestrial explanation for mysterious phenomena, recommending instead the use of a well-tested trio: Occam’s razor, peer review, and the adage “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.

Despite Loeb taking a sabbatical from Harvard, he’s still pushing ahead full steam ahead in hopes of traveling to Papua New Guinea to search the seabed for traces of the 2014 meteor. He wonders if this meteor could also represent technology from beyond Earth.

As Siraj explained in his Scientific American article published six days after Space Command’s tweet, “The holy grail of interstellar object studies would be to obtain a physical sample of an object originating from outside the solar system — a goal considered daring.” how scientifically groundbreaking.”

Prof. Avi Loeb, front center, with guests at a conference celebrating his 60th birthday, Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, June 2022. (Courtesy)

The discovery has revived what Loeb describes as the most productive period of his career, falling during his first sabbatical in nearly two decades after he left Harvard’s astronomy chair in 2020.

During his academic absence, Loeb has published the textbook Life in the Cosmos, as well as Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, a best-selling nonfiction book about Oumuamua that has been translated into 25 languages. He has also published an NFT while working on another book and a documentary. He continues to publish guest commentary and scholarly papers, and receives several requests for interviews (he once did 12 in a single day). And he’s not entirely absent from Harvard. As leader of the Galileo project, he is responsible for installing a telescope system at Harvard College’s observatory to look for unidentified aerial phenomena, or if you prefer the more popular term, unidentified flying objects.

“It would be arrogant of us to sit on the sofa at home and say, ‘Where is everyone?’ without looking through our windows for neighbors,” Loeb wrote on May 18 in a reflection on the previous day’s congressional hearing on UAPs, while also expressing hope that the Galileo project will clear the government investigation within a day or two could support for years.

Prof. Avi Loeb sits with author Leslie Kean in the observer seats of the Great Refractor Telescope at Harvard College Observatory, March 1, 2022. (Courtesy)

He told the Times of Israel that he regrets not being in the classroom – “teaching young people is of course always a pleasure” – but added: “I enjoy the creative work I do both in research and in the classroom Writing and talking enormously about something new. When you’re teaching a class, it’s about something that’s already in a textbook, already known. I enjoy discovering something new much more.”

Loeb did just that in 2019, when he learned about the now-famous meteor five years ago while preparing for one of his many interviews — in this case with a New York City radio station.

He asked his assistant Siraj – then a student at Harvard – to search a database called CNEOS for the fastest-moving objects that might have formed outside the solar system. The database is compiled by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Siraj found that on January 8, 2014, one such object crashed into the Pacific off New Guinea. Two items from the data looked unusual. Overspeeding at about 40 kilometers per second outside the solar system, the meteor picked up speed as it traveled through the solar system at about 60 kilometers per second — about 134,000 miles per hour.

“It was moving so fast,” Loeb wrote in a March 10 Medium post, “that its previous trajectory was thought not to have been tied to the sun.”

Loeb said the speed of 60 kilometers per second is twice that of most stars relative to the Sun’s proximity, ruling out the possibility that those stars are an origin for the meteor. Meanwhile, the composition of the meteor seemed tougher than iron. Meteors composed of iron are rare, accounting for only five percent of the total number of known space rocks.

“We decided to write a paper about this being the first interstellar meteor,” Loeb said. “It preceded the discovery of ‘Oumuamua in 2017 by almost four years.”

Artist’s rendering of the interstellar asteroid Oumuamua. Scientist Avi Loeb believes it could be an extraterrestrial artifact. (Courtesy/European Southern Observatory, M. Kornmesser)

The caveat was that the government could not release the uncertainty measurements related to objects from the database detected by spy satellites.

Because of this, Loeb said, his and Siraj’s paper “was not accepted by publishers who did not believe the government and did not have access to the actual data the government was using and the uncertainty.” [measurements] in the data.”

He bemoans scientists who are “very suspicious of data coming from the government, who don’t trust the government, who say we should only focus on studying rocks within the solar system… This was a clear case of something.” outside the solar system. We weren’t part of the expert club that talks about space rocks. They would not allow it to be published.”

If the government had published the error bars, Loeb explained, “it would say something about the quality [satellite] Sensors that are part of the missile warning system. If they reported the exact dates, the opposing nations could find out where the US is [satellites are].”

He tried to check the government data. Later in 2019 there were some justifications. With the help of two Los Alamos-based officials, Alan Hurd and Matt Heavner, and the Trump White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Loeb was able to access the original measurement of uncertainty regarding the meteor, which confirmed his findings 99.999 percent.

Prof. Avi Loeb, right, in the Ignatius Forum at Washington National Cathedral, November 10, 2021. (Courtesy)

Finally, on April 6 of this year, Space Command tweeted a memo from its Deputy Commander, Lt. Gen. John Shaw, to NASA formally confirming Loeb and Siraj’s findings.

“We went through different people until US Space Command issued a letter to NASA,” Loeb said of the memo. “Based on the data they had, it confirmed that the object was from outside the solar system.”

A Harvard Gazette article cited “a bureaucratic deadlock” for the three-year delay and credited the breakthrough to a White House Office of Science and Technology official, Matt Daniels, the deputy director for space security. That article also quoted Siraj, who stated that he and Loeb hope a peer-reviewed journal will eventually publish their work.

Loeb is willing to make an additional suggestion about the meteor – that it could represent extraterrestrial technology, something he also posited about ‘Oumuamua. Although the meteor isn’t, it wants to search the seabed for evidence of the collision.

“We’d like to find out what it’s made of,” he said. “Even if it’s a natural object like natural iron, it may not contain exactly the same elements that we find in the solar system.”

“We could learn about other environments just by examining the composition,” Loeb added. “Even if it’s natural, it would be really interesting to find out.”

Considering the historical precedent that would be set, he mused, “Just imagine the new horizons.”