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Comment by civilitty | Hacker News Reader

The Chief Scientist of US Space Operations Command "confirmed that the velocity estimate reported to NASA is sufficiently accurate to indicate an interstellar trajectory" [1] using "additional data available to the Department of Defense" which I assume is classified.

As far as I can tell this paper isn't making any extraordinary claims about extraterrestrial intelligence [2] (which Loeb is infamous for), it's just confirming that the chemical composition - the ratio of beryllium, lanthanum, and uranium specifically - doesn't match any known minerals or alloys in our solar system.

There are thousands of known minerals so it's not out of the question that they're wrong.

[1] https://twitter.com/US_SpaceCom/status/1511856370756177921

[2] The second to last sentence notwithstanding: "Another possibility is that this unfamiliar abundance pattern may reflect an extraterrestrial technological origin."

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Other still disagree that the evidence claiming the object was interstellar is a done deal.

>Skepticism about the endeavor flared at a recent Asteroids, Comets, Meteors Conference that occurred while the deep sea expedition was underway. There, Dr. Desch argued that had the fireball been moving as fast as reported, there would have been nothing left to find

Also:

>Dr. Brown also presented at the conference, describing a recent analysis using data from an assortment of instruments to crosscheck measurements for 17 of the objects listed in the same NASA fireball catalog used by Dr. Loeb and Mr. Siraj. His results, which have been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, indicate that the catalog data often gets directions and speeds wrong and that the size of the error for speed measurements increases for objects with greater speed.

July, 2023:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/24/science/avi-loeb-extrater...

So he’s arguing that with a certainty of 9.9999% they’re still mistaken? Anyone want to help the math on that?

> "additional data available to the Department of Defense" which I assume is classified.

Spot on

> The 2014 meteor was originally identified as an interstellar object by Siraj in 2019 when he and Loeb were studying Oumuamua. The pair posted their findings as a preprint and submitted their results to an astronomy journal, but the paper was not accepted for publication because they used data from a NASA database that used classified information that could not be verified.

> The snag started a three-year process as Siraj and Loeb worked through a bureaucratic logjam to receive government confirmation on their findings, working with scientists and officials at NASA, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and other offices. They eventually connected with Matt Daniels, assistant director for space security at the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, to get an analysis from Shaw and Mozer.

https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/scientific-discovery-gets-k...

Another possibility is that these iron spherules have a terrestrial technological origin. For example, metallic iron can be formed in coal ash, and coal ash was regularly dumped at sea when coal was used as a fuel for ships.

Stable isotope evidence is needed to really justify an ET origin (there is no good reason for the isotope abundances in a different stellar system to be the same as in our own, with the exception of the ~10K stars that formed in the Sun's natal cluster), but skimming the iron isotope data I'm not convinced.

Next we'll be hearing that this unfamiliar abundance pattern may be the signature of a room-temperature superconductor.

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