There’s no doubt an extremely bright fireball careened through the atmosphere north of Papua New Guinea on January 8, 2014. It’s also true that divers recovered materials at the bottom of the ocean last year near where many experts believed the object landed—and that prominent Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb theorized some of these metallic spherules were possibly of “extraterrestrial technological” origin. But as to the ground vibrations recorded at a seismic station on Manus Island during the same atmospheric event? The explanation is likely much more mundane.
“[T]hey have all the characteristics we’d expect from a truck and none of the characteristics we’d expect from a meteor,” Johns Hopkins planetary seismologist Benjamin Fernando said on Thursday.
Fernando and his colleagues will present their findings on March 12 during the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas.
Although Fernando’s team concedes it’s difficult to prove what something isn’t through signal data, it’s pretty easy to highlight the characteristics it may share with existing, explainable seismic info.
“The signal changed directions over time, exactly matching a road that runs past the seismometer,” said Fernando.
[Related: How scientists decide if they’ve actually found signals of alien life.]
To further bolster the much more everyday explanation, researchers also utilized data collected during the 2014 event by facilities in Australia and Palau originally built to measure nuclear test sound waves. After factoring in those recordings, Fernando’s team revised the previous location estimations for a more exact spot of the atmospheric occurrence—an area 100 miles away from the original region.
“The fireball location was actually very far away from where the oceanographic expedition went to retrieve these meteor fragments,” Fernando said of the 2023 recovery trip. “Not only did they use the wrong…
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