Extra-terrestrial invader downgraded to a truck
10 Mar 2024
Ground vibrations picked up at a remote seismic station a decade ago and attributed to a meteor may have a more mundane origin, suggests new research.
A team from the US Johns Hopkins university, headed by seismologist Benjamin Fernando, argues that the sound waves data reported in 2014 from the Papua New Guinean Manus Island had been misinterpreted.
While a meteor was identified entering the Earth’s atmosphere, the cause of the sound waves, assert the scientists, was probably vibrations from a truck travelling along an adjacent road.
“The signal changed directions over time, exactly matching a road that runs past the seismometer,” said Fernando.
“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 team will present its findings to the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston on Tuesday 12 March.
In August last year, there were reports of the discovery of what was thought to be extra-terrestrial materials near to where the meteor’s fragments were thought to have fallen nine years earlier .
However, Fernando’s team suggest that the meteor’s entry point was elsewhere and identified no evidence of seismic waves in the area from the falling object.
“The fireball location was actually very far away from where the oceanographic expedition went to retrieve these meteor fragments. Not only did they use the wrong signal, they were looking in the wrong place,” insisted Fernando.
He said that data from stations in Australia and the Micronesian state of Palau used to detect sound waves emanating from nuclear tests suggested the meteor location was more than 100 miles away from the originally identified site.
While the materials were probably extra-terrestrial, these were likely to be ordinary meteorites or particles produced from meteorites hitting Earth before combining with terrestrial contaminants.
“Whatever was found on the sea floor is totally unrelated to this meteor, regardless of whether it was a natural space rock or a piece of alien spacecraft,” joked Fernando.
Fernando’s team includes Constantinos Charalambous of Imperial College London; Steve Desch of Arizona State University; Alan Jackson of Towson University; Pierrick Mialle of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization; Eleanor K. Sansom of Curtin University; and Göran Ekström of Columbia University.
Photo: The area near the seismic station in Manus Island, based on satellite images acquired on 24 March last year. Credit Roberto Molar Candanosa and Benjamin Fernando/Johns Hopkins University, with imagery from CNES/Airbus via Google.
