Hmm: "Metals found in Pacific Ocean ARE 'alien' objects"

 From the Daily Mail: "Metals found in Pacific Ocean ARE 'alien' objects: New study from Harvard physicist Avi Loeb finds up to 10% have compositions from outside our solar system - and 'not coal ash as critics claimed'." The IM1 meteor measured roughly 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) in diameter, and exploded above the Pacific Ocean on January 8, 2014. Loeb has argued that the meteor was from interstellar space and mounted an expedition in 2023 to recover fragments from the meteor. He returned with hundreds of small metallic spheroids. 

    As Space.com reported at the time, there were significant criticism of his find. For one, according to critics, it would be impossible to track or predict a trajectory for something like that breaking up in the atmosphere. Although U.S. Space Command had provided a letter to Loeb confirming an interstellar trajectory for the meteor, critics say it isn't enough to connect the meteor to the spheroids. From Space.com:

    However, some say that making the leap from that memo to the spherules Loeb recovered isn't possible. Phil Metzger, a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida, wrote in a July 16 Twitter post that "connecting that meteor to a few tiny balls of metal taken from a vast area of ocean floor isn’t a capability of the Space Command."

    Echoing that, 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.)

Uncertain data

    Aside from the difficulties in connecting the fireball event to the spherules found on the ocean floor, there are significant doubts about the accuracy of the data that underpin Loeb's claims to begin with.

    For one, all sensors, whether ground-based or in space, have margins of error or uncertainty. For many scientific instruments, these levels of uncertainty are known, allowing scientists to take them into account when analyzing the data they produce. 

    When it comes to the sensors the DOD used to measure the speed and trajectory of the alleged interstellar meteorite, those uncertainties aren't published publicly due to the fact that the U.S. government does not disclose the capabilities of many of its space-based assets. 

    However, there are public data sets that incorporate measurements from these sensors that can be compared with those made by other sensing stations, allowing researchers to have a rough estimate of the levels of uncertainty in these U.S. government sensors.

    That's according to Brown, the co-author of a recent paper accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal that calls into question the data supporting an interstellar origin for the 2014 fireball that Loeb claims is responsible for the spherules he recovered from the ocean floor.

    Brown told Space.com that, as a result of the finite sampling rate of U.S. government systems such as those used to measure the velocity of the fireball, speed estimates are "systematically overestimated, particularly at higher speeds." 

    Brown pointed out that in the light curve recorded by the U.S. government (a graph of luminosity over time), the January 2014 fireball displayed four distinct flares as it entered the lower atmosphere, but there was "no evidence earlier in the record of any sort of luminosity."

    "And this is a key point," Brown said. "It's very difficult to get an object that purportedly is moving 45 kilometers a second [100,700 mph] down to 18 kilometers [11 miles] altitude, without producing lots of light higher up. It's in fact almost impossible, unless you have something that's extremely strangely shaped. It would have to be very aerodynamic, very low drag, very high density  —  not iron  —  and then you have to explain why it suddenly detonates into small particles at 18 kilometers altitude."

Yet he did recover spheroids (he was criticized on that point, as well, for not having any women on his team, as though that would have made his find more legitimate). 

    So for Loeb, the issue switched to testing the spheroids which brings us back to the Daily Mail article. 

    The samples were subdivided into three compositional types: silicate-rich spherules or S-type, the Ferich (Fe) spherules or I-type and glassy spherules or G-type.

    Around 78 percent fall along S, G and I-type spherules.

    Another group was labeled 'differentiated,' which was found to have higher silicon (Si) and Magnesium (Mg), along with increased ratios of Aluminum (Ai) and Si.

    'These spherules are thus called differentiated, meaning they are likely derived from crustal rocks of a differentiated planet; we label them as D-type spherules, characterized by Mg/Si,' reads the study.

    Another group was labeled 'differentiated,' which was found to have higher silicon (Si) and Magnesium (Mg), along with increased ratios of Aluminum (Ai) and Si.

    And about 22 percent of the 850 spherules were labeled as differentiated.

    The team used a different method to identify spherules with enrichments of Be, La and U [beryllium, lanthanum and uranium].

    This procedure identifies 10 of D-type spherules as BeLaU with low-Si spherules and two as BeLaU with high-Si spherules.

    Loeb explained that it is clear the fragments form from a material that split from a rock-like object, but the chemical composition is unlike any known solar system material with a component of the lunar crust being closest.

    'The elemental composition of the BeLaU spherules was never reported in the scientific literature and is different from familiar spherules from known solar system meteors,' Loeb told DailyMail.com.

    'The abundance pattern does not resemble natural materials on the Earth, Moon, Mars or solar system asteroids and features enhanced abundances of some elements by up to a factor of a thousand relative to the initial composition of the solar system materials. We interpret it as being from outside the solar system. 

    'It constitutes the first recognized interstellar meteor, IM1.'

It's interesting and suggestive, but I don't believe conclusive.