Since my retirement a few years ago, I have focused on two primary topics of interest. One is to make more people aware of ADA concerns ranging from website issues to local government road signs with poor color contrast. The second is to look into the many ways that bias exists in everything. I have given talks on both of these topics at SQL Saturday and Code Camp events many times over this period. However, I feel the need to reach out to more people. Although I have written about bias in the past, this begins the start of a new blog series on bias in today’s world.
Bias in the Astrophysics World
First, some background. On January 8, 2014, a meteorite CNEOS 20140108 (CNEOS stands for Center for Near-Earth Object Studies) struck the Earth near the northeast coast of Papua, New Guinea. It was confirmed to be the first known interstellar meteorite to strike the Earth. However, some believe that it could have been of extraterrestrial origin.
While the meteorite broke up in the atmosphere, pieces were suspected to have rained down into the ocean. In 2022, the Department of Defense (DOD) confirmed that the meteorite was most likely of interstellar origin. How did the DOD get involved you ask? Most likely, it was the new Space Force Command which is tasked with tracking anything entering the Earth’s atmosphere that might pose a threat such as a missile, a falling satellite, or yes, a meteorite. An initial path was plotted to indicate where the debris of the meteorite may have fallen.
A study conducted by John Hopkins University suggested that the reported path of the meteorite and thus the location of its fall may have been wrong based on the fact that the seismic evidence recorded on Manus Island may have only been triggered by a truck on a nearby road. Seismic evidence from a meteorite that probably never hit the Earth, but exploded in the air you might ask?
It is feasible to assume that meteorites explode in the atmosphere with a force as great as the Hiroshima atomic bomb. While most meteorites that explode upon hitting the atmosphere go largely unnoticed because the Earth’s surface is mostly water, electronic detection is increasingly likely as our monitoring systems become more sensitive. Such an explosion of a meteorite would generate a large flash and create a line of debris in the direction in which the meteorite was moving. Not only can the explosion potentially be detected, but it is believed that we have the potential to hear larger objects as strike they the water. Gemini 5 in 1965 splashed down nearly 90 miles away from its intended site, but it was reportedly ‘heard’ by sensitive sonar stations designed to listen for enemy submarines. I would imagine that in the 50+ years since then, our sensors have become significantly better.
In the summer of 2023, Avi Loeb, a professor at Harvard specializing in astrophysics and cosmology led an expedition to try to find fragments of the meteorite off the ocean floor. Dr. Loeb is best known for the 2018 theory he proposed that an object called Oumuamua might be not only an interstellar object but may be an extraterrestrial object. Part of his theory was based on the fact that Oumauamua had increased in velocity as it left the solar system. Researching other meteorites that have hit Earth hoping to find a similar one, Dr Loeb felt that CNEOS 20140108 was most likely a similar object. If nothing else, it represented an object with a velocity of 60 km/s which is higher than the 42.1 km/s needed by an object at the distance from Earth from the Sun to place it in a hyperbolic path that would have allowed it to escape the solar system. It was also one of the arguments why the object could be interstellar.
Thus in 2023, Dr. Loeb led the Galileo Project to drag a magnetic sled across the ocean floor to try to recover debris from the 2014 meteorite. Of course, that would assume that the fragments were magnetic and not all metals are magnetic, nor are all meteorites metallic. In fact, only about 1 in 20 meteors recovered on Earth are iron meteorites which could be attracted by a magnetic sled. After several days of sweeping the ocean floor, they finally retrieved small spherules. These spherules had a composition of 84% iron, 8% silicon, 4% magnesium, 2% titanium along with a group of trace materials.
The discovery of iron was important to make the spherules magnetic. But what was really interesting was the ratios of Uranium 235 and 238 along with lead 206 and 207. These isotopes can be used to determine the age when the material formed. Uranium 238 decays to Lead 206 with a half-life of 4.47 billion years and Uranium 235 decays to Lead 207 with a half-life of 0.71 billion years. Once the rock is formed, the amounts of these isotopes are fixed. Any subsequent change in the ratios can be used to determine when the rock formed. In this case, the age seemed to indicate that the spherules were nearly 14 billion years old. Our solar system was formed only about 4.6 billion years ago. This was the second indication that the material came from outside of the solar system.
But was it of extraterrestrial manufacture or naturally occurring? Just because something is from outside of the solar system, does not imply it is extraterrestrial. This is the point where some objected to Avi’s theory that it could have been debris from an extraterrestrial vehicle. In a New York Times article of March 9, 2024, by Darren Orf, there was a statement by Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University who stated that “people are sick of hearing about Avi Loeb’s wild claims… It’s polluting good science conflating the good science we do with this ridiculous sensationalism and sucking all the oxygen out of the room.” Did you detect just a little bit of bias there? I sure did. The fact is that we do not know what the meteor was. Yes, it probably did come from outside our solar system. Yes, it could just be a rock formed early in the creation of the Universe. Yes, it could be debris from an alien spaceship or a probe (like our Voyagers). The fact is that we do not know. However, to shut down a respected scientist just because you don’t like his theory even though you have no real proof one way or the other is a bias that should never appear in science.
We have seen similar examples of bias by ‘professional’ scientists many times in the past. A good reference if you are interested, is the book, “Science Was Wrong” by the late Stanton T. Friedman who was a nuclear physicist by trade. But I have my own examples such as the belief when I was in elementary school that continents were fixed in position and did not move. My father grew up in a time when talk of men going to the moon was considered a fantasy. Yet, he lived to see Apollo astronauts walk on the moon. And we all know that continents float across the mantel of the Earth. Science is based on theories. They represent the best explanations we have at the moment for what we observe. There can be alternative theories, even conflicting theories. In no case should one’s personal bias give one the right to refer to another theory as “ridiculous sensationalism” much less that it might “suck the oxygen out of the room.”
Besides learning something about this very interesting investigation into interstellar material which could lead us to understand more about the formation of stars and galaxies, I hope you can see how bias often appears in so-called professional critiques. More importantly, I hope you can avoid such biased comments when evaluating your co-workers if you do not have the proof to back them up.
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