[ad_1]
While many, including two Harvard astronomers, have interpreted Space Command’s statement to NASA as confirmation that the meteor is interstellar, some astronomers believe more data is needed to support the claim. They say current measurements lack error bars that show how precise or uncertain they are.
“The sentence is not enough. Scientific results are published, it’s not a secret,” he said. said Maria Hajdukova, a researcher at the Institute of Astronomy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Slovakia who studies meteorites and studies Space Command verification. I’m not saying I don’t believe it, but if I don’t have the facts, I can’t argue,” she said.
NASA said a public statement This month, “the short duration of data collected – less than five seconds, makes it difficult to pinpoint whether the object’s origin is truly interstellar.”
“Frankly, we can’t confirm it’s interstellar,” Lindley Johnson, NASA’s planetary defense officer, said in an interview. “Although at high speed, at a speed that could potentially be interstellar, it is nearly impossible to verify that it is interstellar without accompanying data – from data from a longer data range or other sources not available in this case.”
Dr. Loeb and Mr. Siraj disagreed. Dr. “Five seconds is a lot of time,” Loeb said. “It’s not the time that counts, it’s the quality of the data put together. In five seconds you can do a lot in terms of instrumentation and measurement.”
He and Mr. Siraj plan to resubmit their paper to The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Peter Veres, an astronomer with the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center that monitors objects in the solar system, said data on the 2014 meteorite from the military could help their arguments.
These data show an unusual sequence of three bursts of light as the object races through Earth’s atmosphere. “It looks weird, I can tell,” said Dr. Veres points out that meteors’ brightness during their fall typically only peaks once.
[ad_2]
Source link