It was quite the small impact, but the United States has confirmed that the first interstellar object on Earth crashed and broke up back in 2014. According to VICE, the small meteor entered the atmosphere and soon became a fireball in the sky over Papua New Guinea.
As VICE adds, a United States Space Command (USSC) memo shared the crash details and noted that scientists believe the space rock sprinkles interstellar dust on the ocean floor in the South Pacific. More importantly, the release confirms a discovery by a pair of Harvard researchers that the meteor was interstellar in origin and now stands as the first interstellar object to enter our solar system.
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The meteor in question is only a few feet wide, nothing compared to the Comet Borisov or ‘Oumuamua, two larger objects noted to have come from beyond our solar system. The major difference is that those did not come close to the Earth, where the Harvard meteor slammed into the South Pacific.
“I get a kick out of just thinking about the fact that we have interstellar material that was delivered to Earth, and we know where it is,” Amir Siraj, Director of Interstellar Object Studies at Harvard’s Galileo Project, told VICE in a phone call on the topic. “One thing that I’m going to be checking-and I’m already talking to people about-is whether it is possible to search the ocean floor off the coast of Papua New Guinea and see if we can get any fragments.”
Obviously, the odds of finding any object remnants are pretty slim, something Siraj noted to the outlet. “It would be a big undertaking, but we’re going to look at it in extreme depth because the possibility of getting the first piece of interstellar material is exciting enough to check this very thoroughly and talk to all the world experts on ocean expeditions to recover meteorites.”
Siraj and his co-author on the study Avi Loeb both were inspired by the discovery of ‘Oumuamua after it entered the solar system, using the quarter-mile-sized rock as a launching point to study the fireballs and impacts database run by NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies.
After combing the data, Siraj and Loeb pinpointed the rock in question from an explosion near Manus Island on Jan. 8, 2014. The speed of the object, blistering at 130,000 miles per hour and showing that it had a “possible origin from the deep interior of a planetary system or a star in the thick disk of the Milky Way galaxy,” the 2019 study read.
“It was really fast, and so I was like: ‘Oh my God, this could be an interstellar meteor,’” Siraj told the outlet. “It was hiding in plain sight. It wasn’t that we had to dig to find this database. It was more that there hadn’t been an interstellar object until 2017. As a result, no one had a reason to think that there could be meteors that were from outside of the solar system.”
The March 1 memo confirms the velocity and origin, reaching the desk of Joel Mozer, Chief Scientist of Space Operations Command. The possibilities are expanded upon in the Vice piece, with hopes being tempered but wide open to possibility. But it has given us a glimpse at the space beyond the solar system from the comforts of Earth, a fact that could change someday due to discoveries like this.
