A team of researchers noticed seismic signals in an expedition last year. They thought it was from an interstellar object, but it turned out to be a noise from a truck, according to another group of scientists.

Interstellar Signal Was Reportedly From a Truck Not Meteor

A new study seemingly questioned the reports published by Avi Loeb in 2023 "Interstellar Expedition" in Papua New Guinea, where the team claimed to have found IM1, a metallic piece from the meteor CNEOS 2014-01-08, which they believed was our first interstellar visitor.

Data from a seismic station on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, which detected vibrations that appeared to be caused by the meteor's flaming, very quick journey through Earth's atmosphere, helped Loeb and his team narrow down their search region. But the latest research suggests that the cause of those vibrations is probably considerably more mundane.

"The signal changed directions over time, exactly matching a road that runs past the seismometer," study leader Benjamin Fernando, a planetary seismologist at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, said in a statement.

"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 expect from a truck and none of the characteristics we'd expect from a meteor."

The Manus Island data did not show a fireball signal, according to Fernando and his team. However, one was detected in measurements taken by nuclear testing vibration detection stations in Australia and the Pacific island of Paulu.

Furthermore, the researchers found that the center of that signal was over 100 miles (160 km) from where Loeb's team conducted their meteorite quest.

According to Fernando, the oceanographic expedition gathering these meteor fragments was quite far away from the fireball spot. They were not only looking in the wrong spot, but they were also using the incorrect signal.

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Avi Loeb Reacts To The New Study

Loeb searched for metallic fragments of CNEOS 2014-01-08, or as the researchers refer to it, IM1, in June 2023 by dragging a magnetic sled across the seafloor in the area that is thought to be the drop zone close to Papua New Guinea.

In July of last year, Loeb declared that the mission had been successful. Hundreds of millimeter-scale spherules had been gathered, and Loeb felt that this discovery would pave the way for future astronomy in which objects outside the solar system will be examined under a microscope as opposed to a telescope.

The astrophysicist from Harvard stood by what they found out from their expedition. In a blog post published on Medium on Friday (March 8), he stated that the Manus Island data was not the primary factor in determining the search zone for the trip. Instead, he and his group mostly depended on data acquired by U.S. Defense Department (DoD) sensors.

According to him, the data from other seismometers farther away did not provide meaningful constraints, whereas the new preprint used the large uncertainties from these other seismometers to make their claims. He stressed that if they were to ignore the DoD localization data, the fireball could have been anywhere across a large region.

He added that the astronomers who rejected the DoD data and insisted that it must be completely false should lose their sleep at night because their skepticism suggests that their safety is not guaranteed and that their taxes are being squandered on an unstable national security apparatus.

The peculiar makeup of the retrieved spherules, which his team discovered to be much enriched in uranium (U), lanthanum (La), and beryllium (Be) relative to native solar system material, was another point he brought up.

"Our research team's analysis of 60 elements from the periodic table shows that these spherules are not coal ash and did not originate from the crust of the Earth, the moon or Mars," he concluded, insisting that the material they found from their expedition was from something out of our planet.