Government Admits Oumuamua Wasn’t First Interstellar Object
The U.S. military confirmed the first interstellar object to hit Earth was years before Oumuamua and corroborates research done by a famous astronomer.
We’ve reported before about Oumuamua, the first interstellar object to enter our solar system in 2017, and Harvard professor Avi Loeb’s book arguing Oumuamua might be extraterrestrial. Whatever it was, its existence was remarkable as the first interstellar object to enter our solar system.
But now, we are learning that Oumuamua was the second interstellar object to enter our solar system, and this discovery was made by none other than Avi Loeb.
In 2019, Loeb, working with his student Amir Siraj, combed through the database of meteors looking for other interstellar objects. When they found evidence of a fast-moving meteor that hit the Earth, they wrote a paper arguing it was interstellar too and preceded Oumuamua by almost four years.
“The referees of the paper that we wrote rejected the paper, and argued that it should not be published,” Loeb said. “Because they don’t trust the government and perhaps the uncertainties that are often quantified in the scientific literature as ‘error bars,’ which they are just the level of uncertainty in the measurements (that) are unknown.”
So the paper could not go through peer review or be published because although they used a public government database, the level of uncertainty, or error bars, were kept classified. The U.S. military does not reveal that information as it could give away the sensitivity of their equipment. The paper was stuck in academic limbo until now…
The U.S. Space Command just released a memo sent to NASA’s science chief confirming Loeb and Siraj’s work. Sharing in a tweet that they, “confirm that a previously-detected interstellar object was indeed an interstellar object.”
Besides proving Loeb right, that the meteor in 2014 was interstellar, what is the significance of this event?
“First of all, the government helps the progress of science, which is quite a watershed moment in a way, because this was classified information, they were willing to release part of it — they are not giving us the full measurements — but they’re saying at 99.999 percent, that we were right in our 2019 paper with my student,” Loeb said.
“The second point is this is actually the first interstellar object to have been detected because it predates Oumuamua by almost four years. Finally, Oumuamua was about 100m in size, and we discovered it with telescopes because of the reflection of sunlight. In the case of a meteor, you see the fireball generated as it rubs against the atmosphere and burns up, and so you can see smaller objects because you are not relying on reflection of light from the sun.”
So what’s next? Can we find this object on Earth?
“Any meteor is disintegrating into fragments, so we can go off the coast of Papua New Guinea where this meteor landed and look for the fragments from this meteor and study it,” Loeb said.
“That’s not a very expensive expedition; much less than the billion-dollar space mission needed to land on an object like Oumuamua, the first interstellar object reported. So, it offers a completely new way that is not so expensive, at learning about the composition of the material that made the object, about perhaps whether it’s natural or artificial in origin. We can put our hands on whatever is left from it and bring it to laboratories at a relatively modest cost.”
What does this whole series of events show us about the future of science and space exploration?
“Science is supposed to be guided by evidence, not by prejudice, and not by the number of likes on Twitter,” Loeb said. “Altogether, I think it’s a celebration of science in the sense that the government is willing to declassify some information that is of national security importance. Second, we found a new avenue for exploring the nature of objects the size of a meteor that came from outside the solar system. It’s very likely that, in terms of artificial objects produced by extraterrestrial civilizations, there are many more small objects than big objects.”
Loeb and Siraj argue that studying interstellar meteors could prove extraterrestrial life, saying in their paper that meteors could, “deliver life from another planetary system.”
Earth's Magnetic Field is Shifting and Geologists Don't Know Why
Something strange is happening with the Earth’s magnetic field and scientists are unsure why, according to a recent paper published in the journal Nature. A consortium of geologists in charge of the World Magnetic Model is having trouble keeping track of the planet’s magnetic north pole as it rapidly shifts from Canada to Northern Siberia.
Scientists updated Earth’s magnetic model in 2015, which is used for some pretty important things, including shipping navigation and GPS on smartphones. Their model was intended to last for at least five years, but due to the recent unexpected swing, it became outdated at some point in early 2018 and is now in need of adjustment.
“The error is increasing all the time,” said Arnaud Chulliat, a geomagnetist at the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information.
Scientists say this shift is being driven by liquid iron sloshing around in the planet’s core, a natural process, but one that can vary as the flow changes. Over the past 20 million years, Earth’s magnetic field has consistently experienced a complete pole reversal – usually every 200-300,000 years.
At the moment, we’re long overdue for one of these events, with the last reversal having occurred 781,000 years ago. No one is quite sure what the consequences will be on modern infrastructure when and if that reversal happens. Many take ease in the fact that pole reversals have occurred hundreds of times in the planet’s history without catastrophe, but again, the effect on modern technology remains unknown.
Some scientists have pointed to this shift as a potential culprit in a slew of recent dolphin and whale beachings as well as other unexpected animal die-offs. It’s believed the planet’s natural magnetic field is necessary to some of these animals’ navigation when traveling and communicating over great distances underwater. One NASA scientist is currently looking into this potential connection.
In 2016, a larger-than-usual magnetic pulse shot up from South America, which scientists believe played a role in furthering the recent shift. However, they’re still unsure whether it will continue on this course, or even what will happen at all.
Could we be on the precipice of a massive geomagnetic reversal, or is this just due to slightly-more-anomalous-than-usual activity in the Earth’s core? And what’s even more pressing – what kind of effects is this having on us?
For more on our brain’s relationship with Earth’s magnetic field, check out this Gaia Original short:
