For the scientific narrative of the message below, click here.
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From: Avi Loeb
Date: Mon, Mar 11, 2024 at 12:01 PM
Subject: Misleading report
To: Matt Richtel, a health and science reporter for the New York Times (NYT)
Dear Matt Richtel — NYT,
I just saw your short interview with Ben Fernando and wanted to correct some of the statements you had mentioned there. As the write-up stands, the public is misinformed. Let me explain.
The meteor’s fireball was localized on January 8, 2014 by satellites of the Department of Defense (DoD), not by the public seismometer data analyzed by Ben Fernando. The expedition I led in June 2023 surveyed the DoD localization box which measured 11.12 kilometers (7 miles) on a side. We criss-crossed 26 times in a region of 10–20 kilometers around the DoD box center.
The survey region was not dictated by the seismometer data that Ben Fernando analyzed, but by the official localization coordinates in the CNEOS database at:
https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/fireballs/
The DoD coordinates for the peak brightness of the fireball are accurate to tenth-of-a-degree precision at latitude and longitude: 1.3S, 147.6E and an altitude of about 20 kilometers. The other coordinates mentioned for the fireball light curve (1.2S, 147.1E) referred to its entry flash into the atmosphere a couple of seconds earlier. These two points are indeed oriented along the meteor’s direction of motion.
In his paper, Ben Fernando ignores the DoD localization. Instead, he considers public data from distant seismometers and gets very large uncertainties. His 90% confidence region includes the DoD box, but he argues that the center of this huge region (an ellipse with axes of 186 and 388 kilometers) is somewhere else. As any scientist knows, you cannot prefer one point over another within your 90% region. It is unprofessional of him to claim that the DoD box is incorrect just because his 90%-confidence region contains other points.
The DoD data relied on satellites which detected the light from the bright fireball. Ben knows that but ignores the DoD localization by stating in your interview that we went to survey the region identified by the seismometer in Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. The data from this seismometer was just used to validate the DoD box, not to define our search region. The reason is simple: one cannot localize a fireball without triangulation from multiple sensors. The statements made in your report are therefore untrue and I beg you to correct them.
For the full details of our expedition, see our recent paper:
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2401/2401.09882.pdf
as well as my essay:
Without reporting science accurately, how can we hope to report politics correctly?
With kind regards,
Avi
Abraham (Avi) Loeb
Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science
Director, Institute for Theory & Computation
Harvard University
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. His new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2023.
