Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Have interstellar meteors hit the Earth?

Episode Date: February 13, 2024

Daniel and Kelly analyze recent claims of the recovery of iron spheres from interstellar meteors.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA. terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate.

Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness. I'm Danny Shapiro, and these are just a few of the powerful stories I'll be mining on our upcoming 12th season of Family Secrets. We continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Kelly, do you have strong feelings about invasive species?

Yeah, I mean, on the one hand, it's usually our fault. But I do think that in general, ecologists get a bit unnerved when you mess with the local ecosystem. But shouldn't you have some sort of like respect for these invaders? I mean, they just like came in and they were better suited to survival, right? I mean, I guess so. But in a lot of cases, like the new environment doesn't have their usual parasites or predators. So they have like an unfair advantage, at least initially. But, like, also, would you feel that way if advanced aliens came and started killing us?

Like, would it be okay because they can? Would you have grudging respect? I actually would have grudging respect, and I hope that, you know, they would share the physics behind their laser beams and emulation devices and all that stuff. And, hey, then it might be worth it. Okay, wait, hold on. Remember, both my kids, who I know you're always trying to kill, And your kids are included on the list of being fried by aliens in this scenario.

I know, but I still learn the secrets of the universe, so I already factored that in. I'm still pro-invasion. All right, that's the first shuttle that goes to Mars. I'm putting your name on the manifest. I don't want you on the same planet as my kids. No way. Fair point. Hi, I'm Daniel.

I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I'm happy to be negotiating on behalf of Earth when the aliens arrive. I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith. I'm adjunct at Race University, and I hope that Daniel is far away from Earth when the aliens arrive. He might trade our children for some tiny little physics secret. Look, it's all going to be on the table, right? You never know what the aliens are going to want.

Maybe they just want to scoop up some algae and slurp it, but maybe they want to fry our children. You keep my children off the table. They can have the algae, although I can imagine there being some bad downstream effects. My phycology friends would not be happy. But definitely you're not giving them my kids. Oh, you're so parochial. You're on the wrong side of history here, Kelly.

I'm all right with that. Well, welcome to the podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, where we do our best not to fry our children and sacrifice them to invading aliens, but to understand the universe anyway. Somehow with all the photons and the particles and the little bits of rock that arrive here on Earth, we've managed to piece together an understanding of how the universe works out there, what's out there, what the tiny little quantum particles are, the supermassive black holes that shape our. galaxies. All of that is sending us clues and we're trying to digest them and explain them to you. And that's why we don't need the aliens and their information. But Kelly, we've been doing it for thousands of years and there's still so much we have left to figure out. Wouldn't you like to fast forward to a super advanced understanding? Not if I'm trading my kids for it.

All right, everybody. You heard it. If we are living in ignorance, it's because of Kelly's selfishness. Wait, wait. I'll trade Daniel's kids for it. it. So problem solved. Okay. See, the negotiation begins. All right. We're starting to thaw that cold position of yours. But nobody wants anybody's kids to fry, absolutely. But we do want to understand the universe. And frustratingly, we are mostly limited to figuring it out based on the clues that arrive here on Earth. Photons that have traveled for billions of light years across the universe, little bits of protons and electrons and all sorts of cosmic great.

particles. We are working hard to piece that together to get a picture of everything that's out there in the universe. And we'll get there without the aliens. And while the photons that arrive here on Earth do travel almost all the way across the universe. I mean, we see things from very, very early in the universe. We are limited when it comes to the stuff that arrives here, the actual chunks of stuff that we can use to study things that happen on other planets. We found little bits of Mars on Earth. We sometimes get rocks from elsewhere in the solar system, but the universe is vast and we would love to have a sample of bits from other places. Wouldn't you like to have a scoop of a distant star or a sample from an atmosphere of an exoplanet? Yeah, no, that would be

pretty awesome. Who knows what we could find? Is our solar system the same as all those other solar systems? Is it totally different? What can be found in the hearts of distant stars and under the surface of distant exo moons. We don't know and we'd love to find out and we know that the universe is always holding surprises for us. Oh, I want to start asking you questions about what we might expect, how we might expect those things to be different than what we found on Earth, but I'm probably jumping the gun. You are a little bit. But today on the podcast, we're going to be exploring that question, whether it's possible to sample planets around other stars, whether we can just sit here on our own little rock and wait for those bits to come to us. So today,

on the podcast, we'll be answering the question. Have interstellar meteors hit the earth? Oh, there's nothing better when the data comes to you. Wouldn't you love to just sit at home and have all the parasites like walk through your kitchen and report for duty? You know what? I actually have mixed feelings about that. It depends on the parasites. I suppose so.

Your kids do live in that same kitchen and eat breakfast there. So probably you want to keep a sharp line between those things. All right, right. It's great when physics data comes to us. But the parasitology data, I'll go collect. And we have done a little bit of exploring. You know, we've been to the moon. We've sent probes to Mars and to orbit other places in the solar system.

But really the amount of stuff that we have to study that comes from off of Earth is vanishingly small. like a few pounds of Mars rocks, a little bit of an asteroid that we managed to collect. And most of the stuff that isn't from Earth that we can study came to us automatically. We didn't send a robot together. We just waited for rocks to hit the Earth and gather them. Is it possible that there's just like loads of rocks from our solar system that are still on Earth? But we just look at them and we're like, that's a rock. And my friend Callan would say, all rocks are interesting.

But he's a geologist. I'm not quite sure he's right about that. But do we probably have tons more data, but we just don't recognize it as being different than the earth rafts? Oh, absolutely. Meteors are hitting the earth all the time, and they have for billions of years. And so these things are scattered all around the surface of the earth and even buried within it. I recently read a study that showed that they see traces of the proto planet that hit the earth

and led to the formation of the moon. They call it Thea. It's probably happened four billion years. ago, they can see bits of it lodged in our mantle, like they can identify underground which bits came from that protoplanet and how it created this weird distortion in the shape of our mantle. Oh my gosh. So everything on the surface of the earth and underneath reveals its history, its history of bombardment.

So yeah, it's probably stuff all over the surface of the earth for people to just pick up and learn about our solar system. So when my kids come home with like pockets full of rocks, I shouldn't throw them out the window when they're not looking because they might be more valuable than I realize. They absolutely might be. But I agree with your geologist friend. Every rock is interesting because every rock tells a story. It was formed at a certain moment.

And then it was weathered. It was oxidized. It captures stuff within it. Each of them really tells us something about the billion years long journey that they've survived. They're like a little time capsule. Yeah, I know you're right. But the most interesting ones are not the ones in your kids' pocket, which probably come

from Earth. And also not the ones that even come from our solar system. While little bits of Mars are fascinating, we would love to explore much deeper out into the universe and see things from other planets, remnants from other solar systems. And that's why today we're asking the question about interstellar meteors.

So before we dig into it, I wanted to know what people out there thought about the question of whether interstellar meteors have hit the Earth. So thank you very much to everybody who participates in this audience play-along segment of the podcast. If you would like to join for future episodes, don't be shy. Write to me to questions at danielandhorpe.com. So think about it for a minute. Do you think interstellar meteors have hit the earth? Here's what people had to say. Well, Earth's been around for

extremely long time. So you would think that sooner or later, some interstellar meteors would have hit the Earth. So I'm just going to go with a guess that, Yes, interstellar meteors have hit the Earth. I suspect they have, but it would be surely very rare. I would say probably, but none that we know of. Interstellar meteors would have to be very lucky to even hit our galaxy, and even if they made it to our galaxy, they would have to be very lucky to make it through all the other stars and planets

and the gravity that they have to actually hit Earth. But I feel like there's a chance that maybe one or two has made it through. So I'm going to say yes. I'm going to say no because I imagine coming into our solar system would probably be caught up in the gravitational pull of a different planet or become an orbit in one of the asteroid belts, maybe? What do you think of these answers, Kelly? Well, so for starters, I had never heard Omoa, Muwa.

How do you say that? Oh, Muamua. Okay. So for starters, I had never heard of Oh, Muamua, and that is an incredible name. I love it. It's so much fun to say. It's beautiful.

And, no, I thought these were all good responses. I mean, but, you know, so, like, we've only been watching the skies for, you know, a small fraction of humanity's existence. How do we know, like, you know, if you find a rock in your backyard and you're like, well, maybe this is from Mars, how could you be sure that it wasn't interstellar? Like, how do you know that it wouldn't look the same because everything's made out of the same stuff? Yeah, it's a great question. And we don't know for sure, right?

We know something about the formation of our solar system. And so we know what rocks on Earth look like. And we can tell if a rock was from Mars because it has a different chunk of stuff. Mars is made of different elements and different ratios of those elements and different isotopes because of where it was formed and how it was formed and its history. So we can tell when our rock is from Mars rather than from Earth. But what we don't know is if solar systems out there have Earth-like planets and Mars-like planets with the same elements.

Whether you could tell the difference between a rock from Earth and a rock from some exosome. Earth or if they're very, very different and our solar system is unique in some way so that planets formed around other stars could be very different from the planets that formed around our star. That's sort of the basic question. Okay, so it seems like you are sort of starting to already tell me why we would want interstellar meteors in the first place, not just because you like rocks so much, but these rocks in particular could tell us something cool. Exactly. We want interstellar meteors for the same reason we want to study meteors. Meteors give us a sample of the rest of the solar system. How exactly did the asteroid belt form? What is Pluto made out of and what does that

tell us about the formation of the solar system? What is really at the core of Jupiter? Where did Jupiter form in the inner solar system or in the outer solar system? Samples from these planets can give us clues about the story of the formation of our solar system and the dance that the planets made as the whole thing was evolving. And in the same way, samples from planets around other solar systems would tell us about how those formed and give us the context for the formation of our own solar system. That's sort of the most specific answer, the most general answer for like why you would want to see interstellar meteors is just curiosity. Like who knows what's in it? We've been thinking about the universe and exploring it with photons. But every time we've developed a new capability,

every time we've figured out a way to probe the universe in a way we haven't before, it's always revealed something surprising, sometimes mind-blowing, sometimes in a way that like really upends our entire understanding of the universe and the context of our lives. So if we got an interstellar meteor and could study it, it could reveal something totally crazy, things beyond what even science fiction authors could imagine. Okay, so you've convinced me that this is interesting. And I've been convinced that, umuamua, say, how do you say it? Oh, muamua. Oh, Muamua is also fascinating. Tell me more about that.

Right. So we know that some interstellar objects have come through our solar system, but we've only ever seen two of them. Like there's thousands and thousands of asteroids out there and things hit the earth all the time, but only twice have we identified things that we are sure didn't come from within our solar system. And the first, the most famous one, what I'm kind of embarrassed for you, Kelly, that you never heard of, as a deputized physics nurse.

nerd is Omuamua, which came through the solar system in 2017. I'm a deputized physics nerd. Yes, congratulations. Thank you. Oh, I'm sorry I've let you down. This is a real emotional roller coaster for me, but tell me more. No, you officially have a PhD in podcast physics from Daniel and Jorge University. Fantastic.

I'm putting it on my CV. But in 2017, the Pan Stars Telescope noticed this rock. And it was moving really fast, 26 kilometers per second, but most importantly, it had a non-solar trajectory, meaning it was moving along a path, a direction, a location, of velocity, which would not allow it to orbit the sun. It meant that it had come in from outside the solar system, was going to bend around the sun, and then shoot again out of the solar system. Was there some giant smashing happening in a different solar system, and this thing got shot out of their solar system super fast? It's a great question. There's lots of question marks about this object. We saw it sort of on its way out of the solar system. It sort of passed near the sun. And by the time we spotted it, it was already headed out, it was moving really, really fast. So we have really limited data about it. We don't know a lot about its shape. We don't know a lot about its reflectivity. The best speculation is that it's a chunk of ice, probably lost by some other star. You know, most stars have not just planets, but like big chunks of frozen ice balls and a hay. around the star. Like we have the Oort cloud, which is a source of long period comets.

These things are little chunks of ice and they're really, really far away from the star. So they are gravitationally bound, but they can also be kicked out of their stable orbit by a passing star. Interactions with other galactic stuff. And so sometimes that means it falls inwards towards the inner solar system and becomes a comet, or maybe smashes into a planet and kills all of its dinosaurs. And sometimes it means they might be lost by that star and just float through interstellar space, occasionally, randomly encountering another solar system. Hmm. And is that the only one we've seen? Or maybe I shouldn't ask any more questions because I don't

want to lose my DJEU physics degree. No, once you have tenure, you can't lose it. Kelly, it doesn't matter. Oh, my goodness. So that was the first one. And it was very spectacular. And people really wondered about it. There's a lot of stuff we still don't understand about it. Like, very weirdly, as Omulamua was leaving the solar system, it seemed to accelerate a little bit. Like it wasn't just moving on a pure gravitational orbit. It actually sped up a little bit as it was leaving, which led some people to speculate like, oh, is this an alien ship? Or is it like a little bit of alien junk, like maybe a light sail lost by some alien civilization?

These days, the best explanation is that it's probably a chunk ice. And as it was leaving, some of that ice boiled off and gave it like a little poof. I have decided that my feelings are hurt and that it was an alien ship that, that, you know, maybe was watching one of our news channels and was like, I'm out and they left as fast as they could. Maybe. Most of the astronomy community and the astrophysics community thinks that the chunk of interstellar ice is the most likely explanation. On the other side of the debate is famous Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who wrote a book about how Omuomua was probably a chunk of alien tech, though most people think he doesn't know what he's talking about. And we did a whole podcast episode sort of dissecting his claims and why there's no basis for them. Yeah.

Let's just be clear. I really think the ice answer is the way to, I was joking. But these things are pretty rare that we did see a second one in 2019, an amateur astronomer. Someone who makes his own telescopes, a guy named Borisov, saw a second one. This thing also came through the solar system on a trajectory that makes us sure that it didn't come from our solar system. system. The head of velocity in a direction that just is not compatible with motion around the sun. And this thing is probably a 10 kilometer wide comet. Wow. That's like extinction level, right? Yes, exactly. Closest approach to Earth was about 2AU. So we were nowhere in danger. But yeah, these things can be moving really fast relative to our solar system because they're not linked to us gravitationally.

And as the sun moves through the galaxy, these things could be going in any direction. So yeah, they are a little dangerous. Fortunately and unfortunately, they're pretty rare. And they come and go so quickly that there's no chance for us to like plan a mission to go explore them. Is that right? Exactly. People thought, oh, let's go sample something from Oumuuma, but it was already moving so fast that if you launched a probe, it would take forever to catch up and then forever to send back data. And so these things are basically once and gone.

You're lucky to get any pictures of them, not to mention samples, which is why everyone would love if one of these things would hit. the earth obviously not a really big one you know not one that's going to vaporize us but one that's going to survive the atmosphere land on the ground not hurt anybody and leave us a bunch of clues about what's going on out there in the universe but gosh this was a quick podcast episode because that hasn't happened right well that's exactly what we're going to dig into as soon as we come back from this break. Ah, come on, why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient.

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so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene.

In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is Back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school. a week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot.

He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them.

I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Imagine that you're on an airplane and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers. The pilot is having an emergency and we need someone, anyone to land this plane. Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane

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Those who lack expertise lack the expertise they need to recognize that they lack expertise. And then, as we try the whole thing out For real. Wait, what? Oh, that's the runway. I'm looking at this thing.

Listen to no such thing on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so Daniel was just about to tell us that the podcast episode is over because we don't have any interstellar meteors, right? Well, there's a really interesting discussion about one possible blob that could have been interstellar. Tell me more about that. So in 2014, this is now 10 years ago, a meteor hit over Papua New Guinea.

And this thing is about the size of a dishwasher, they're pretty sure. It weighs about half as much as a giraffe. All right. So pretty big, but not going to kill us all. That's great. The thing is big enough to make a detonation in the atmosphere, but not big enough we think to like land on the surface and like, have a chunk of rock that you can look at and point to and even find.

But it was traveling. So you just told us that our other two potentially interstellar visitors were coming from a trajectory where we knew that they weren't from our solar system. And so this one was, was it doing that? So that's one of the questions. And Avi Loeb in 2019, together with a Harvard undergraduate, combed through a bunch of data from U.S. intelligence satellites and look for meteors that had a trajectory that might have been interstellar. So they combed through this database and they found this one. They're like, oh, this is interesting. According to the measurements of this thing's velocity and direction, it might have been interstellar. And so they got kind of excited

about it. And by might have been, what are the error bars on a phrase like that? Yeah. And so there's a lot of discussion about exactly that. The thing is that this data comes from US Space Command, and it was observed by U.S. intelligence satellites, but the data from those satellites are a little bit obscure. Like, we don't get the super high precision data from U.S. intelligence satellites because the U.S. doesn't want to reveal like everything it can measure. This is like classified secrets. But in early 2022, U.S. Space Command issued this declaration saying that it was probably interstellar. They said that their trajectory was, quote, sufficiently accurate to indicate an interstellar trajectory.

all right that's i mean that's awesome that sounds that's pretty confident that sounds pretty exciting and so in 2023 lobe and his team at harvard decided they were going to go try to find this thing like it hit over the ocean and they think maybe it fragmented in a fireball and then sprayed little bits of itself into the ocean and if they went and dragged a sled across the surface of the bottom of the ocean, they might pick up little bits of it. So that sounds like the ultimate needle in a haystack activity. How hard would it be to retrieve fragments from the seafloor? It's definitely not easy, but Avi Loeb was like, hey, let's at least try.

Let's see if we can figure it out. And his thought was that some of the bits of this meteor were going to be iron and these things are going to be magnetic. And so if you could drag a magnetic sled across the seafloor, maybe you'll pay. pick up little bits of this thing, little like chunks of the meteor that survived the atmosphere and hit the ocean and then sank down to the bottom. Now, if you have a science mind at all, there's lots of questions here, like how sure are you where it landed?

How do you know about the tides and the currents? How do you know where it's going to fall? What else might be there? How could you distinguish it from the other stuff? How would you know if it was interstellar? All of these questions are raised immediately by this fishing expedition. It's a long list. They went and they did it.

And so for two weeks, they dragged this custom-built sled equipped with magnets and cameras and lights across the seafloor. And at regular intervals, they pulled it up and they gathered any metallic bits. And in the end, they have a bunch of these things they call sphules, like basically tiny little iron balls around like a quarter of a millimeter up to two millimeters in radius. Okay, so first of all, why would you be sure that this object had? iron in it. And then also, aren't there a lot of iron containing objects on the seafloor to begin with? Yes, absolutely. It turns out the seafloor is covered with these iron spherules from solar system meteorites and from other sources of iron. So it's not that rare to find spherules. And in a minute, we'll talk about analysis by experts in this area and how skeptical they are of the claims that

Loeb and his team ended up making. Okay, they found some. And then what evidence did they provide to suggest that these were interstellar instead of just like boring old earth iron. They found like 700 of these things in the area where they thought this meteorite had hit. And they also went and checked a couple other areas and they found fewer of these little spherules. So that led them to conclude like, oh, maybe we found the right region. Maybe we have hit on the sort of destruction path, this wreckage from this meteorite because there are more spirals here than there are nearby. And then they did an analysis of these things. If you look of their paper, you can see they have like super close-up pictures of these things. And they are like

tiny little iron BBs. And they did things like measure the elemental composition, like how much beryllium, how much uranium, how much iron, what kind of isotopes of iron are there? And from that, they try to learn whether or not these things are consistent with bits of our solar system or inconsistent with bits of our solar system. And you said tried to, which makes me think that the The argument was not iron clad. Hmm. So they make two kinds of arguments. One is about the ratio of iron isotopes.

Like iron is an element. There's a few different varieties of iron. There's iron with more or fewer neutrons in it. So it's like a tiny bit heavier and a tiny bit lighter. And by the ratio of those isotopes, you can tell something about where it came from and like the chemical interactions it's been involved in, which we'll dig into in a minute. But they also looked at the beryllium, the lanthanum, and the uranium. in these things. So like more exotic elements. And some of these things have like more

beryllium, lantium and uranium than they expected. And so they claim that these things are consistent with an interstellar meteor. For example, there's a lot of beryllium in there and beryllium is kind of hard to make. So they suggest that maybe the beryllium in this thing was made as this interstellar meteor passes through interstellar space and is hit with radiation, which is one of the ways that you make beryllium. But couldn't something that got like shot from Mars get hit with interstellar radiation before it landed on Earth?

Or the argument is it would have taken a lot more time for that. But it could take a long time to get from Mars to Earth. Yeah, you could be floating around in the solar system for a long time. And this is a bit of a weak argument, I agree. But the interstellar radiation is a little bit different than the inside the solar system, solar wind. So there might be a little bit of an argument there. Okay.

So they had these spirals and they looked a little weird according to them and based on their expertise. So they posted this paper in late 2023, claiming spirals of likely extrasolar composition. So like this was a big claim. This made a huge splash. Like discovering bits of an interstellar meteor would have enormous scientific consequences. And so I'm sure they did an enormous amount of work to make sure that they were correct before they released this. And so my first thought is you say paper posted. Do you mean like paper posted after peer review or, I mean, I know physicists do things a little differently.

They tend to post things, what, on archive first before peer review? Is that right? So maybe that would be standard. But tell me what paper posted meant. So they put it on the internet. They put it on the archive. It had not yet been peer reviewed. And in some fields, this is standard.

Like actually in particle physics, we post our papers as soon as we're done with them. before they're peer reviewed. But everybody knows they're not yet peer reviewed. And so you gotta wait and see if it really stands up. In astronomy and astrophysics, it's actually the opposite. People wait and post their papers to the archive after their peer reviewed.

And so this was a pretty unusual move, not just because they posted the paper before peer review, but also because the claims in the paper. Like they didn't just claim that these things were likely extra solar composition, like a hunk of rock from another solar system. They said, and I have to quote this because it's amazing, they quote, may reflect an extraterrestrial technological origin. Like not, yes, not only are they suggesting these things could

just be bits of rock from another solar system already amazing, but bits of technological junk from an intelligent civilization from another solar system. Like to make that leap to me is just incredible. Wait, have we just not yet talked about the evidence that they used to support that claim because we've like skipped it so far? Or have we really talked about everything? No, there is no evidence to support that claim. Just like, hey, look, these are weird and they have a strange mix of elements. Maybe they come from an alien iPhone. That's really the whole argument there. And then add to the mix, the same day this paper is posted in 2023, Ivy Loeb publishes a popular book for a mass audience called Interstellar,

The Search for Extraterrestrial Life. That's all about his search for little bits of technology from alien species elsewhere in the galaxy. And then he gives a bunch of interviews. And in the interview, he sort of like conflates whether the paper has been published as in peer-reviewed or just post it online. And so he really gives people the impression like, oh my gosh, look, this is really backed up with scientific study.

That doesn't sound good. And so everybody was like, hmm, that's interesting. We'd love to believe it, right? We're scientists, let's keep an open mind. Maybe Loeb did discover bits of an alien iPhone. That would be fantastic. Nobody wants to reign on the parade if it's true, right? But, you know, extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence.

And so I, for one, was waiting for a detailed critique from experts, people who know, like, how likely is a meteor to survive this thing? How likely was it that it had an interstellar origin? What can we conclude from the elemental composition of this stuff? And very recently, there was a paper by Stephen Desh and Alan Jackson, two experts in this area, professors at ASU and Towson University, and they went through in a meticulous fashion and took apart his claims. Oh, boy.

So who are we going to side with by the? end of this episode. We can decide with the evidence, of course. All right. So where do we start then digging in to the many arguments we just talked about? I want to start by reading this paragraph from Desh and Jackson's paper, which I think sums it up pretty well. And like, this is not the kind of thing you typically find in a science paper.

This is fire. So what they wrote is, quote, because of the boldness of the claim, it might be expected that lobe at all exercise due diligence to a little bit of. alternative more prosaic explanations for the data and would report their results carefully and deliberately. They did not. Slope at all hardly considered and did not test the simplest alternative hypothesis. The spherals they found were of a common and well understood type found worldwide from solar system asteroids.

Apparently, the authors did not seek expert opinion and posted the discovery manuscript before it had been peer reviewed and accepted or even submitted to a science journal. journal end quote i am getting i'm getting heart palpitations as a fellow scientist i cannot handle this this is very my empathy is through the roof right now but but they should have done new diligence i know being publicly called out like this not just like hey look we disagree we took another look at the evidence we think maybe you were wrong have you considered but this is really calling them out for sloppy science for not considering reasonable alternatives and basically for are looking to confirm the story they were hoping to find. It's really pretty damning.

Well, let's dig in. Okay. So tell me more about those. Should we start with the sphere rules? Or should we talk about the, you know, how good were the trajectories suggesting it was interstellar? Yeah. Let's start with whether or not this thing even was interstellar, which is sort of the reason

this whole thing got started, right? Like the U.S. Space Command issued this statement that it was an interstellar trajectory. That sounds pretty solid, right? Yeah. But, you know, then NASA chimed in and said the short duration of collected data less than five seconds makes it difficult to definitively determine if the object's origin was indeed interstellar. What this comes down to is the precision of the measurements of this thing. Like, how well do we know how fast it was going and the direction of its motion?

Oh, so that doesn't sound good. So how often, like, when you only have about five seconds worth it, data like how much error do you have in in that that's exactly the question to ask and so in this case whether or not it was interstellar comes down to its velocity like anything at our radius that's going about faster than 42 or 43 kilometers per second has escape velocity and is not bound to the sun so if this thing was moving faster than 42 kilometers per second relative to the sun it's not bound to the sun and it was interstellar so that's the question now the measure the velocity of this thing to have like 61 kilometers per second relative to the sun,

which is like almost 20 kilometers per second above the threshold. So it seems pretty safely interstellar. But then the question is, well, what are the uncertainties? If it's 60 kilometers per second plus or minus one or two, yeah, it's interstellar. If it's 60 kilometers per second plus or minus 60 kilometers per second, then you really don't know very much, right? Yeah. So Loeb in his paper claims that based on U.S. Space Command, we can be 99.99% certain this thing is interstellar. But in Desch's paper, they reveal the source of this. And it's basically just an assumption. They assume that the uncertainties are like 10%.

That this thing is like, you know, 60 kilometers plus or minus six kilometers. Oh, that's not good. Yeah, but it's basically just an assumption. And there are other people who have studied the accuracy of these measurements from U.S. Space Command. Sometimes you get like two different measurements of the same. rock and so you can say oh well let's see how accurate it is and it turns out that this data from the intelligence satellites maybe because they're not

precise maybe because it's fudged maybe because it's purposely smudged because it's intelligence data shows really large variations so the uncertainty could easily be much more than 10 kilometers per second so there's there's pretty good reason to believe that the error is so big that it would include objects that are not of interstellar origin exactly so even if this thing is measured to be 60 kilometers per second with an uncertainty of 10 or 15, that seems to still keep it above the 42 kilometer threshold. But remember how the statistics here, like it gives it like a one in a thousand chance of being mismeasured. And you might think,

oh, that's still pretty good. Like it's got a one and a thousand chance of being mismeasured and a 99 out of a thousand chance of being accurately measured to be interstellar. But remember that there are lots and lots of these rocks. And so if you look at thousands, or millions of rocks, you're going to see one in a thousand events every once in a while. It's like if you roll the dice a thousand times, you're going to see really rare stuff eventually. And we have essentially been rolling the dice thousands of times, right? Exactly. There are thousands of things in this database. And so if you look through the whole database, you'll see really rare looking events just because you've looked lots and lots of times.

And so the evidence that this thing is interstellar is actually pretty weak. It might just be a very mismeasured solar system asteroid. And you expect a mismeasured solar system asteroid to look like an interstellar object one and a thousand times about. Okay. So it might not have been traveling from an interstellar location. That's problem one. Let's move on to critique two. Where are we going next?

So next, Desch points out that this thing probably would not have survived reentry. The idea that enough of it survived to land in the ocean and cause these spirals seems really unlikely. This thing was coming into like 140 times the speed of sound. And at that speed, like the front of it gets melted and heated and vaporized and the whole thing would have come apart. So Desh did a calculation that showed that 99.999% of it would have been vaporized. So basically like almost all this thing is gone. It's just like in little individual particles by time it reaches the ocean surface. And then it's going to slowly sink to the bottom and your chance of finding it, if anything, survived, would have been pretty low.

Yeah, exactly. And we probably have pretty good data on this, right? Because we've probably observed a lot of stuff that hits our atmosphere and burns up in the atmosphere. Absolutely. People know how this works. And Dash actually went back to Loeb's paper. check their calculations and they found a mistake like they cannot confirm the number that lobe calculates for like how this thing would have melted in the atmosphere so they suspect that they just

like plugged in the wrong number and that's why they misunderstood exactly so so far it looks like this thing was probably not interstellar and even if it was probably would not have left any remnants when it hit the atmosphere it's just too small for anything to survive all the way through the atmosphere Okay, all right. But so let's say it was interstellar and something did survive. How likely are we to have been able to find it and then know that it was interstellar once we got it? Yeah, this is basically your question when you first heard this, right? Like, how would you even find this thing?

It's a needle in a haystack. So, yeah, assume it's interstellar and that some of it survives and then you get enough iron that it hits the surface of the ocean that sinks down, that you could potentially find it, that it's even there for you to find it. Another big problem is, hey, the ocean is really big, it turns out. And finding like basically BBs on the bottom of the ocean, you need to really know where you're looking. And there's a lot of uncertainty about this thing. We've got like five seconds of data about its trajectory.

And if you extrapolate that to the surface of the ocean, there's a pretty wide range where this thing could be. And now you're going to like drag your tiny little magnetic slug, lead over this thing, you know, what are the chances you're even dragging it in the right place? Well, can we take one more step back? And I'm sorry if you said this and my brain was just discombobulated at the time. How do we know for sure that it's going to be, that it would be iron and that this magnet is what we should be using to collect it? How can we be sure that this intercellar thing is iron? We can't, but there's a lot of iron out there and a lot of heavy metals.

And iron is a pretty common thing because it's like the end point of nuclear fusion, making things heavier than iron is hard. And so iron is pretty widely distributed in rocks in the solar system and maybe in rocks in other solar systems. But it's a great question. Like maybe our solar system is weird. And once we get samples from other solar systems, we'll discover, wow, iron isn't as common as we thought. So yeah, this is a big assumption that rocks from other solar systems will have enough iron to make little metal balls we can pick up with. our magnets. Okay. All right. So let's assume it is iron for sure and that the magnet method is going to work. The ocean is big. And deep. And so what kind what like range of like locations where

it would have fallen? Like how good was there certainty and where it would have potentially fallen? So the location data we have, if you believe it, gives a box that's like 20 kilometers by 20 kilometers for where this thing might have landed. And like, that's huge, right? You're not going to drag your magnetic sled to cover an entire square, 20 kilometers by 20 kilometers. So what Loeb and them did is use a little bit more data. There's a seismometer on an island about 90 kilometers away that also measured like

a blip around the same moment. And so they use that information to try to narrow it down a little bit. And they find like a little band through this box. that they think maybe is where this thing landed. So they have like a slightly narrower region and they drag their sled basically through this band and then a couple other spots to get control measurements. Did that blip on the seismometer?

Does that increase our confidence that maybe something did make it to the ocean bottom or did survive reentry? The seismometer is actually most likely measuring the detonation in the atmosphere. Right? Because this thing as it comes to the atmosphere, it's going to explode as like pockets of gas or whatever inside of it, heat up unevenly.

So probably this is measuring the explosions in the atmosphere. But as Desh and I'll point out, number one, all these measurements are very uncertain. Like the seismometer itself is very uncertain. If you take a look at the data, like there are a lot of blips nearby. That could have been anything. So Loeb and them assigning this blip from the seismometer

to this particular bit of rock is very, very speculative. You know, basically they were just looking for a way to slice the region down and I hope they find something. There's not really strong evidence that this is the region. The most damning thing that Desch points out is that according to Space Command, there's two possible locations. There's the box that lobes search, and then there's another location that could have been where it hit, like 60 kilometers away.

So it could be they were looking in completely the wrong place. Oh, man. Okay. All right. So might not have been interstellar. Probably wouldn't have survived reentry. If it did survive reentry, we're not. super sure where it landed and only one of two possible spots was searched and maybe not even

all of the possible of one of the two spots. Let's take a break to build suspense and then and then let's talk about the spheres that they did find and how they tried to argue that like what how good was the evidence that those were were not from here. Ah, come on. Why is this taking? So long. This thing is ancient. Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, ultra-light, ultra-powerful, and built for serious productivity with Intel core ultra-processors,

blazing speed, and AI-powered performance. It keeps up with your business, not the other way around. Whoa, this thing moves. Stop hitting snooze on new tech. Win the tech search at Lenovo.com. Unlock AI experiences with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, powered by Intel Core Ultra processors, so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.

The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back.

In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't.

trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. It's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio out Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.

Imagine that you're on an airplane and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers. The pilot is having an emergency and we need someone, anyone to land this plane. Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control. And they're saying like, okay, pull this, do this, pull that, turn this. It's just, I can do it in my eyes closed.

I'm Mani. I'm Noah. This is Devin. And on our new show, No Such Thing, we get to the bottom of questions like these. Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise lack the expertise they need to recognize that they lack expertise. And then, as we try the whole thing out for real. Wait, what?

Oh, that's the run right. I'm looking at this thing. Listen to No Such Thing on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. I feel like my blood pressure is going up as I'm watching someone else's arguments get dismantled. It's a weirdly personal, it's a weird experience.

But okay, so. I know. I know. You don't want anybody out there in science to like be publicly dismantled. It's terrible. It's embarrassing. If people are making good faith efforts. to do their science.

We should treat it with respect and we should take it seriously. The question here is like whether Loeb and all really are making a good faith analysis of this data or whether Loeb is just promoting his book. Well, and also at the end of the day, sometimes people are going to be made uncomfortable because science needs to be picked apart for the process to work. And so here we go. Okay, so tell me more about those spirals and how certain we are that they were interstellar. Right. Because even if you don't believe this thing was interstellar and might not have survived reentry and you don't know where to look, they did drag something across the seafloor. And if they found something weird that we can't explain, those other arguments don't really matter, right? Like they found something cool. Maybe it was a different interstellar meteor or whatever. So let's think about what they actually found. So they did find a bunch of these ferales. And they did compare the number that they found on their drags to numbers in other areas. They're like, you know, boated over to other regions and dragged the sled across a couple.

other spots to try to understand what was typical, what was common. How many spherals do you expect to find on the ocean floor? And according to their analysis, they found more in this region where they were looking for this interstellar meteor than in the other spots. But there's not only one reason for why one area could have more spirals than others, right? Exactly. Exactly. And so when you read Desch's paper, you realize, boy, it'd be helpful to understand this field at all before you dive into it because it turns out number one the ocean floor is littered with these things like the earth is getting slammed by meteors all the time where little bits of it are making to the ocean surface and then sinking to the ocean floor like you drag a magnetic sled across anywhere in the ocean

and you're going to find these spirals and then they're going to vary apparently the variation and the number of spheres you find depends on a lot of stuff the currents the shape of the ocean floor all sorts of stuff affects the variation and the number of is just huge. There's millions of these little balls of iron per square kilometer. And so even if this thing did happen to land here, this meteor would contribute like much less than 1% of all the little spheres you find on the ocean floor, even if it was there. It'd be very hard to find spheres from this particular meteor among the like millions of spheres you expect to find on the ocean floor. And Loeb's team only found like 700. So you would expect like a very small. small number to be from this meteor, even if it did hit in this region. Okay. All right. And so that, but, but the 700 that they found. And one more comment on the number. Even the 700 they found Lobanol claim is like, ooh, we found extra in the region we were searching compared to the control regions. They didn't take enough data in the control

regions to really measure how much should be in the control regions. So the variation, the claim like, oh, we found more here than elsewhere is not even statistically significant. But all right. Maybe they were lucky. Maybe they found something really exciting. So what they did is they measured what's in these furials, like how much iron is there and which iron isotopes. And then also what are the weird elements that are in it? So first, the iron isotopes, they measure iron in all these different isotopes.

There's iron 54, iron 56, iron 57. And the ratio of these isotopes tells you something about where it was formed and what's happened to it since. And did they, was it weird? So Loeb and them look at the ratios and they see something a little weird. That's true. Earth isotopes tend to have a particular ratio of 57 to 54 and 56 to 54. And a lot of these little iron balls that they found had like more or less of one of these two iron isotopes.

The problem is that this can be very easily explained by chemistry. Like it turns out, when you take an iron sphero from the earth and you do some chemical process, like interaction in the atmosphere or interaction with seawater even, then it tends to lose the lighter isotopes faster because the interaction depends on the mass and things that are lower mass will move around more and interact more. So this changes like these ratios in a very predictable way. And all of the iron balls that they found on the seafloor

lie exactly across the line you would expect stuff to happen if it came from our solar system and then interacted with seawater. This is like exactly what you would expect for solar system iron balls. And they'd been sitting down there for a decade or something, right? So plenty of time. If this is from the right asteroid that they were trying to find, it would have been down there for a decade reacting. Yeah, exactly.

And so Loeb's team seems to claim, oh, look, these are different from the nominal ratio we expect, but they didn't seem to understand like the seawater chemistry will give you exactly this kind of variation. This data they took is like a real dagger in the heart of their claims. It like proves that these are solar system iron balls because they lie exactly on this line. If things came from another solar system, you might expect them to have a very different elemental composition. If it came from a star from like five billion years ago, maybe there was less iron form because it was earlier in the universe and just like less metal had been made.

And so you might expect like really weird elemental compositions. But what they found is like pretty normal. kind of stuff you find on the seafloor all the time. They just didn't seem to understand the context. Ouch. So have we, is the massacre done or is there more? There's a tiny little bit more. They claim that the composition of the other elements like beryllium, lanthanum, and uranium

is very unusual, but it turns out also that this beryllium can be explained with just interaction with the seawater. you would never even get this much beryllium from interstellar travel. Even interstellar travel would not create this much beryllium, but you can do it just by sitting on the seafloor and interacting with seawater, we'll do this. If they'd done a more systematic scan of the ocean floor, they would have found lots more examples of this stuff,

not just where they thought the interstellar meteor hit, but elsewhere in other places. These things are not that unusual. So, you know, there's always a part of me that holds out a little bit of hope for the scientist who's getting kind of destroyed in an argument like this? Have they, has Loeb and his collaborator responded to these arguments to provide some counterpoints, or is this pretty much the final word? It's hard to imagine them responding in a way that their claim survives.

So far, we haven't heard anything from them. But before this paper came out, Loeb complained that nobody is taking his science seriously, that he's like dismissed by the mainstream science community. and this is evidence that like academia is closed-minded and science is dogmatic and you know it's the kind of thing people tend to say when their work isn't taken seriously that there's some other reason other than like well maybe your work is not that serious and so lobe because he's a Harvard astrophysicist you know he has a lot of credibility with the media and so he complains that nobody took him seriously and then he said quote if someone comes to me and says for these scientific reasons i have a scenario that makes much more sense than yours then i'd rip up that paper and accept it. That's a direct quote from Loeb. So now it stands to see like somebody has come forward with scientific reasons with a much more plausible scenario that fits the data much better. Let's see if Loeb concedes or if he comes back with a scientific orbital and says actually here's another way to

analyze the data. How long has it been since the counter paper came out? So Desson Jackson's paper came out November 13th. So it's been about a month since this recording. So everybody's waiting to see what Loeb is going to come back with. But I thought it was important that we discussed this today in the podcast because, you know, we're teaching everybody to think like a physicist, to be skeptical, but also excited. And you have to balance those things. You have to remember like we want to be open to crazy new surprising discoveries and learn things about the universe. But we also have to be very careful in our methods. And we have to make sure that what we're doing is reasonable so that we're building knowledge and not just spinning fantasies.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's so easy to get super excited about a results that, you know, would be a real game changer. But those are the times when you really need to think, okay, what do I need to know? You want to try to prove yourself wrong in as many ways as possible. And it doesn't feel like that due diligence was done here. Yeah. Before I publish any paper, I'm always attacking it myself. I'm always asking what could we have done wrong or how could we have been confused? et cetera, et cetera, because it'd be terrible to publish something and then be like, oops, sorry, we misled everybody, even if it was in good faith. And so while it seems clear here that the

science is not solid, we can't actually say it wasn't in good faith, but it certainly doesn't feel like a good faith science argument. Yeah, agreed. Whenever Zach and I are talking to someone about their new results, our go-to question is, what is the least interesting explanation for your results. Because often, often it's probably the answer. And it seems like here the least interesting explanation wasn't considered thoroughly enough. Exactly. And I'm like the biggest cheerleader for this kind of stuff. Like I would love to meet aliens and I would love for there to be evidence that aliens have visited Earth or even that rocks from other solar systems have landed on Earth and we could study them. I so much want to believe that. But that makes me

also need to be skeptical because again, we want to uncover the truth, not just tell ourselves stories. Right. And you want to know when you're emotionally invested in an answer so that you can try to particularly keep your eye on those sorts of questions. Or financially invested because you're selling a book about how you discovered alien technology. That's right. Oh, goodness. All right. Well, thank you very much, everybody, for listening to today's episode. and thank you for Kelly for taking this ride with me where we take a careful and critical look at some astounding claims in science.

Thank you for letting me ride shotgun on this uncomfortable journey. So far, our children are safe and your children are safe and no aliens have arrived for us to negotiate away their lives, but stay tuned. If those aliens come,

I am hiding my kids from you. All right, thanks for listening, everybody. See you next time. For more science and curiosity, come find us on social media where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, Discord, Insta, and now TikTok. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Ah, come on, why is this taking so long?

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Lenovo, Lenovo. Unlock AI experiences with the ThinkPad X1 carbon powered by Intel Core Ultra processors so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling

luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys, then everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its way, wake a new kind of enemy emerged. Terrorism. Listen to the new season of law and order criminal justice system on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy?

That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.