Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb somehow got the idea that a 2014 meteor (the CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor) may have been an interstellar spacecraft that blew up high in the sky. Loeb has recently finished his million-dollar oceanic expedition looking for what he hoped would be remnants of a crashed extraterrestrial spaceship, an expedition he organized. He found no sign of anything looking like a spaceship or any of its parts. Loeb claims to have found tiny round specks only about a millimeter in size. All that he recovered were some tiny metal specks. The metal specks he found are just like metal sea specks found all over the world. But it seemed like Loeb was trying to convince the press that he discovered smithereens of a starship.
The result was stories such as a CBS News story story entitled "Harvard professor Avi Loeb believes he's found fragments of alien technology." Analyzing such stories it seems hard to pin down Loeb as explicitly stating that he believes the sea specks he found are starship smithereens, specks of an extraterrestrial spaceship. But clearly Loeb was doing very much to raise such an idea in the minds of the press, and he was doing nothing to correct story titles like the CBS News story title.
Now finally Loeb's team has released a preprint of a scientific paper on the tiny sea specks that were dredged up. It seems that Loeb's grand claims have been ramped down very much. The paper makes no explicit claims to have discovered any traces of an interstellar spaceship. It merely claims that traces were discovered that "likely" have some interstellar origin. The paper mentions a purely natural origin, saying, "We suggest that the 'BeLaU' abundance pattern could have originated from a highly differentiated magma ocean of a planet with an iron core outside the solar system or from more exotic sources." The first part refers to a purely natural origin (such as a meteor from another solar system), and the "more exotic sources" may refer to all kinds of other possibilities, such as an extraterrestrial spaceship.
Is there any justification for these claims that the sea specks recovered by Loeb's expedition likely came from beyond our solar system? There is not. The paper presents no good evidence that the dredged-up sea specks came from beyond our solar system. The paper is also guilty of a "hide the bad news" presentation, where it's like the authors are trying to make it very hard for readers to discover the relevant facts behind their central claim.
Referring to the path of a meteor that exploded in the sky, and referring to "spherules" that are tiny round specks dredged up from the ocean, the paper claims this: "Mass spectrometry of 47 spherules near the high-yield regions along IM1’s path reveals a distinct extra-solar abundance pattern for 5 of them, while background spherules have abundances consistent with a solar system origin." This claim about a special status of 5 of the 47 speck-sized spherules is false, and we should immediately be suspicious upon hearing this claim of "a distinct extra-solar abundance pattern." Humans have not well-studied the compositions of objects known to have entered our solar system from beyond the solar system. So there could never be a match in which someone found some particular chemical composition in a rock or sphere or spherule, and said, "Yes, that matches the characteristics of interstellar objects." In fact, the five supposedly special speck-like spherules Loeb refers to have the same composition as countless other such spherules scattered all over the world.
In Section 7.6 of the paper, the authors make this incorrect claim: "The spherules with enrichment of beryllium (Be), lanthanum (La) and uranium (U), labeled 'BeLaU', appear to have an exotic composition different from other solar system material." To try and back up its claim about five of its tiny sea specks, the paper refers us to its graphs 12, 13 and 14. Those are extremely confusing graphs that use a logarithmic scale, and fail to tell us what is the elemental composition of the five supposedly special specks.
It is as if the paper was tying to prevent us from easily discovering the composition of these five supposedly special specks. To clearly display their composition would be very easy to do. The paper could have had five nice clear pie charts, that anyone could have easily read to discover the composition of these five supposedly special specks. Instead we have graphs that seem like that they were designed to be as confusing as possible. The appendix of the paper reveals the composition of the these five supposedly special specks, but in a way that is hard to decipher. There is a table that gives the data. The table appears in landscape mode, meaning you have to tilt your head to read it. Also, violating the rules of clear data presentation, each column of element abundances is stated using a different scale.
Laboriously jumping through hoops to read this data, you can get to the bottom of the matter. The six supposedly special specks (labeled with a subclass of BeLaU) appear at the top of the Appendix 1 table, on page 28 of the paper. At first it looks like some of these specks have lots of Beryllium, but that isn't the case. If you look at the Beryllium column header (labeled Be), we see that the Beryllium numbers are stated in fractions of parts-per-million, fractions of .025 parts per million. So when we see 4587 as the Beryllium abundance of one of the BeLaU specks, the biggest Beryllium abundance of any of the specks Loeb dredged up from the sea, that merely means a Beryllium abundance of 4587 times .000001 times .025, which equals a Beryllium abundance of 0.00011, about 1 part in 10,000.
Similarly, if you look at the Lanthanum column header, on page 29 of the paper, you see that the Lanthanum numbers are in fractions of parts-per-million, fractions of .235 parts per million. So when we see 1108 as the Lanthanum abundance of one of the BeLaU specks, the biggest Lanthanum abundance of any of the specks Loeb dredged up from the sea, that merely means a Lanthanum abundance of 1108 times .000001 times .235 which equals a Lanthanum abundance of 0.00026, only about 2 parts in 10,000.
Similarly, if you look at the Uranium column header on page 30 of the paper, you see that the Uranium numbers are in fractions of parts-per-million, fractions of .0081 parts per million. So when we see 1892 as the Uranium abundance of one of Loeb's specks, the biggest Uranium abundance of any of the specks Loeb dredged up from the sea, that merely means a Uranium abundance of 1892 times .000001 times .0081 which equals a Uranium abundance of 0.000015, only about 15 parts in a million.
The table below summarizes the data, showing the strangest things Loeb was able to find in his little specks, after exhaustively looking for any strange thing. The fractions displayed are simple abundance ratios (so, for example, .000001 means 1 part in a million, and .0001 means one part in 10,000).
|
Element |
Highest amount in any of Loeb's spherule specks |
Amount in meteorite (reported before 2023) |
Amount in rocks (reported before 2023) |
Amount in tiny spherules (reported before 2023) |
|
Beryllium |
.00011 |
Never reported? |
||
|
Lanthanum. | .00026 |
? |
Never reported? |
|
|
Uranium | .000015 |
(in Chinese phosphate rocks) (in rocks from various countries) |
Never reported? |
Two papers I link to in the last row refer to uranium levels of about 90 milligrams per kilogram in earthly rocks, which is an abundance of about .000090.
The results shown above are the strangest bit of strangeness that the Loeb "starship smithereens" expedition has to report. And it's nothing very strange at all. It is merely that in one of the 70+ tiny spherules that were analyzed, there was maybe a tiny bit more beryllium and maybe a tiny bit more lanthanum than you might have expected to find, based on previous analytic reports analyzing these elements in meteorites and rocks. The reported Beryllium level of Loeb's sea speck with the most Beryllium did not even match the highest level of Beryllium reported in igneous rocks, being only half of the Beryllium level of 200 parts per million reported in the paper here. The reported Lanthanum level of Loeb's sea speck with the most Lanthanum did not even match the highest level of Lanthanum reported in Finnish rocks, being three times smaller than the Lanthanum level of 920 parts per million reported in the paper here. The uranium level of the spherule with the most uranium is not even remarkable, and many earthly rocks have uranium levels far greater. Does that mean something very remarkable was found? No, it doesn't. Traces of rare elements are found in various concentrations that may easily vary by a hundred times from sample to sample. You could explain the whole difference under the simple idea that Loeb was using state-of-the-art equipment that is better at finding trace concentrations than the older equipment used to get the numbers in the right column above.
A story in the tabloid press is claiming this about Loeb's spherules: "The lanthanum and uranium were 500 times more plentiful than in earthly rocks and beryllium hundreds of times so." That is not at all correct. My table above shows that the highest level of lanthanum in any of Loeb's spherules was three times smaller than a level reported in Finnish rocks (920 parts per million), and that the highest level of beryllium found in any of Loeb's spherules was only half of a level of beryllium reported in some igneous rocks. There was no real uranium anomaly, since earthly rocks mined for uranium have even higher levels of uranium than in any of the specks (in parts per million). The average amount of lanthanum and uranium and beryllium found in the full set of Loeb's spherules was not more plentiful than in earthly rocks.
Nothing very unusual has been found from Loeb's million dollar expedition. Loeb's paper has made the groundless claim that five of the tiny specks gathered by the mission "reveal a distinct extra-solar abundance pattern." The data gathered by Loeb does not even suggest that the specks came from outer space. A 2001 scientific paper ("Magnetic spherules: cosmic dust or markers of a meteoric impact?") reports that tiny magnetic spherules have been found all over the world:
"In the past hundred years, magnetic spherules were found in various geological environments, namely in the Antarctic and Greenland ice and glacial sediments, in deep-sea floor cores, in meteorite fall areas...in volcanic and ..metamorphic rocks. Magnetic spherules found in recent sediments and oceanic floor around the industrial centers may also be the products of air pollution (probably over 99%)."
When science is done properly, you wait for a decent amount of data justification before you go announcing grand conclusions such as visitations from outside of the solar system. You don't go drawing conclusions based on tiny irregularities in only five speck-sized things. And it's pretty ridiculous to take something that's probably the result of mere pollution and to claim that it came from another solar system. It's rather like someone in Los Angeles saying today's smog came from Alpha Centauri.
Loeb recently made the groundless claim that some of his tiny sea specks came from the 2014 CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor, which has been inappropriately given a name of IM1, standing for "interstellar meteor 1." We do not actually know that this meteor came from beyond the solar system. Referring to the sea specks I discuss above, on his blog Loeb recently made this groundless claim: "Five of these millimeter-size marbles originated as molten droplets from the surface of IM1 when it was exposed to the immense heat from the fireball generated by its friction on air on January 8, 2014." At www.space.com we read some reasons for rejecting all such claims:
"Matthew Genge, a planetary scientist at Imperial College London who specializes in meteorites, said that connecting the spheres with the 2014 fireball — or any meteorite fragments with any other meteor — is impossible. 'Meteorite ablation debris has been found, but not from an instrumentally observed fireball,' Genge told Space.com via email. 'There never has been a micrometeorite derived from a specific fireball event, and never will be, since it is an impossibility.' Peter Brown, an astronomer at the University of Western Ontario, agreed with Genge. If the meteor did in fact enter Earth's atmosphere at the speeds reported, Brown said, it would have been vaporized into fragments much smaller than the spherules Loeb's expedition discovered. 'There has never been a meteorite recovered from any object that hits the atmosphere moving at more than 28 kilometers a second [62,600 mph],' said Brown, who studies meteors and small solar system bodies such as asteroids. 'Any solids that would remain would be essentially aerosol-size.' (In a 2022 paper in The Astrophysical Journal, Loeb claimed that IM1 was moving between 52 and 58 km per second, or 116,000 to 130,000 mph.)"
In the same blog post Loeb makes this simply untrue claim: "Five unique spherules... showed a composition pattern of elements from outside the solar system, never seen before." No, there was nothing very unusual about the element composition of the five strangest of Loeb's spherules, and the main irregularities are those I list in the table above, which are unimpressive.
In a NY Post article we seem to have Loeb trying to create the misleading impression that the government estimated something with 99.999% confidence. We read this: "No less an unimpeachable source than the US Space Command went on to confirm, with '99.999 percent confidence' that the tiny spherical objects were interstellar, he said." The government has said nothing at all about Loeb's sea-speck spherules. Loeb is referring here to a letter from a government official who cited a '99.999 percent confidence' estimate made by Loeb himself, not by the government. That estimate wasn't about any spherical objects Loeb recovered, but about whether the IM1/CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor was interstellar. No one at the government made any confidence estimate about either Loeb's IM1/CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor or Loeb's recovered spherical objects. The letter from someone in the government is shown in Loeb's post here. When that letter refers to a 99.999 percent confidence estimate, it is merely referring to Loeb's own estimate, not a government estimate.
In that NY Post article Loeb says, "The composition of uranium is 1,000 times what you find on earth.” This is very untrue. The spherule speck that had the most uranium of all the sea specks Loeb recovered and analyzed had a level of uranium of 0.000015, several times less than the level found in earthly rocks mined for uranium. Such rocks have a level of about 90 milligrams of uranium per kilogram, as reported here, which is a level of 0.000090.
A very recent article in Science magazine gives us this quote about the paper I analyze above:
"But others are dismissive of the preprint, which has not been peer reviewed. Although the geochemical analysis of the debris is solid, the conclusions that Loeb and his colleagues hang on them are 'nonsense,' says Martin Schiller, a cosmochemist at the University of Copenhagen. 'I’m surprised anyone would take it seriously.' Larry Nittler, a cosmochemist at Arizona State University (ASU), calls it 'very weak sauce.' "
In the same Science article we read a reason for doubting Loeb's continued claims that the IM1/CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor was interstellar, based on supposed confirmation from a government satellite:
"A new study out this month in The Astrophysical Journal examined 17 known fireballs captured by both classified U.S. sensors and independent observations. The study showed that the government sensors often overestimated speed, with the errors getting worse the faster things got. 'A third of the time, the numbers are just way off,' says Steve Desch, an ASU astrophysicist."
During the Middle Ages for centuries there was a great enthusiasm for collecting the relics of saints. For centuries people would dig up bones or teeth (often just little bits of bone), and claim that they had magnificent healing powers on the grounds that they belonged to a canonized Catholic saint. Such relics would be displayed in churches, and people would make pilgrimages to see them. Such relic pitchmen remind me of Loeb's antics in trying to glorify his tiny sea specks that are probably mere specks of pollution. The difference is that the medieval relic stories actually seemed to do some good. Possibly because of a placebo effect, countless people would report cures after touching or seeing the alleged relics of some Catholic saint. But Loeb's sea speck antics seem to do very little good other than help sell more copies of his latest book.
Here is the latest tabloid headline sounding like something that we might hear from a carnival barker:
"EXCLUSIVE: Truth about my 'alien' encounter... How I found bombshell interstellar objects a mile beneath the sea - and their limitless potential for life on Earth, by scientist AVI LOEB."
If you gave some specks of smudge pried from the bottom of your shoes the kind of "royal treatment" given to Loeb's sea specks -- that of analyzing the abundance of all of their elements -- you would probably be able to find some tiny bit of strangeness somewhere about as impressive as the strangest thing reported in the "starship smithereens" paper I discuss above. There no evidence of "starship smithereens" in Loeb's paper and no evidence of anything from beyond the solar system, but merely evidence of pareidolia in which a scientist claims to see some trace of something he is longing to see. No strong evidence has been provided that Loeb's spherule specks even came from beyond Earth. It reminds me of things I mention in my post "When Scientists Claim to See Things They Never Saw."
Postscript: A co-author of the paper (Charles Hoskinson) issued a tweet claiming, "We discovered spherules that appear to be from a different solar system due to their ultra high abundance of Beryllium, Lanthanum, and Uranium (thus BeLaU)." But as shown above, none of the abundances were greater than 2 parts in 10,000, and all of the levels were similar to previously reported levels of such elements in some earthly rocks. So what on Earth was Hoskinson doing using the phrase "ultra high abundance"? Another scientist points out that 67 atomic bomb tests were done by the US between 1946 and 1958 within a few hundred kilometers of where Loeb's spherules were recovered, a fact that could account for minor element irregularities in such sea specks.
In an October, 2023 paper Avi Loeb repeats his untrue claim that the US government made a 99.999% estimate about the likelihood of an interstellar origin of a meteor. In the paper he incorrectly states, "In 2022 the US Space Command issued a formal letter to NASA certifying a 99.999% likelihood that the object was interstellar in origin." This statement has a reference to the document here, which merely mentions a 99.999% likelihood made by Loeb himself, not the US government. The careless repetition of this misstatement by the press is an example of the kind of "hook, line and sinker" science journalism that goes on these days.
Loeb states this:
" Mass spectrometry of 47 spherules near the high-yield regions along IM1’s path revealed a distinct extra-solar abundance pattern for 5 of them, while background spherules showed abundances consistent with a solar system origin. The unique spherules showed an excess of Be, La and U, by up to three orders of magnitude relative to the solar system standard of CI chondrites."
The claim of a "distinct extra-solar abundance pattern" for five of the tiny specks is groundless. In the second sentence Loeb gives us two examples of objectionable speech. First, he makes a comparison between his metal specks and "CI chondrites," which are primarily stony meteorites. Of course, if you compare two types of different things, there will be some discrepancy in the elemental abundances. Also Loeb engages in the trick of claiming a difference of "up to three orders of magnitude," a very imprecise phrase that could refer to any difference between about 10 and about 1000. The use of imprecise, vague or misleading language such as this is an indication that we do not have an example of robust science, which is characterized by precise and accurate statements.
In his latest October, 2023 paper Loeb suggests a non-technological explanation for his little sea specks, coming up with some wild speculation of weird natural events in some other solar system. But since the element content of the sea specks is not very unusual, and since there's no reason to think that specks have anything to do with CNEOS 2014-01-08, and since the case that CNEOS 2014-01-08 was from another solar system is weak, this wild speculation has little credibility.
With his typical dogmatism, Ethan Siegel has an article entitled "Harvard astronomer’s 'alien spherules' are industrial pollutants." It would have better to say that the stranger spherules have an element abundance similar to those of industrial pollutants. Siegel mentions the new paper here, finding that the levels of Beryllium, Lanthanum, and Uranium in Loeb's strangest spherules are similar to those in coal ash pollutants. A later article by Siegel has more debunking of Loeb's spherule claims.
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