2023-11-25 16:02:04
Last month, thousands of people in New Hampshire, US, took to social media to report an explosion in the sky that was loud enough to shatter windows. Some, of course, blamed extraterrestrials, while the calmer ones said it might have been the sonic boom of a military aircraft. But without evidence, who might say what it really was? Fortunately for concerned residents, the Galileo project at Harvard University was created to investigate just such an event. Officially described as a way to search for “technological signs of extraterrestrial technological civilizations (ETC)”, the project constantly monitors the sky with the help of cameras and microphones. With their equipment, the team was able to back up the anecdotal reports with real data. As project leader Avi Loeb explained in an article, none of Galileo’s optical instruments recorded anything of interest at the time. But the AMOS acoustic monitoring system, which can record from infrasound all the way up to ultrasound, specifically from 0.05 hertz to 190 kilohertz, captured the 12-second event. The researchers were able to model the data collected by AMOS using the Taylor-von Neumann-Sedov solution. This was originally the II. It was developed during World War II to estimate how much energy is released during the detonation of an atomic bomb from the spherical blast wave it creates. Plugging the pressure wave’s amplitude and duration into the equation, the researchers calculated the energy released by regarding 2.4 kilotons of TNT at a distance of regarding 40 kilometers. They were not UFOs, nor were they atomic bombs. Since the explosion of a tactical nuclear weapon within a 40 km radius of Mount Washington would probably have been noticed by someone, the explosion might have been caused by an object probably entering the Earth’s atmosphere. As it turned out, the Orionid meteor shower was at its peak in the skies over Massachusetts at the time. Given the average speed of these meteors (66 km/s), the researchers believe that the source of the sound may have been a space rock regarding one meter in diameter that exploded. We know, aliens would have been a much more entertaining story. But this is exactly the kind of sound research that is needed to take unidentified/anomalous airborne phenomena seriously.
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