The meteorite believed to have come from beyond the solar system crashed into the ocean in 2014.
A meteorite believed to have come from beyond the solar system crashed into the ocean in 2014 off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Scientists have now launched a deep-ocean expedition to search for the space rock, as it is the only third known object of its kind, the Science Times said in a report. The first two, Oumuamua and Borisov, landed on Earth in 2017 and 2018, the outlet further said.
Oumuamua is about 100 meters long, while Borisov’s is between 0.4 and 1 kilometer. These objects are the first known interstellar objects. However, a meteorite that crashed into the southwest Pacific Ocean was later found to predate these two.
According to weather.com, Harvard professor Avi Loeb and graduate student Amir Siraj were the first to recognize the probable interstellar origins of the meteor, which they named CNEOS 2014-01-08. They reached this result by analyzing the track of the object half a meter wide; its remarkably high heliocentric velocity suggested that it was not being pulled by our Sun’s gravity.
However, due to a lack of information, the scientific community refused to formally designate CNEOS 2014-01-08 as an interstellar object. This was the case because the data used to calculate the meteor impact on Earth was collected by a US Department of Defense satellite. The measurement’s precise error values also became a closely guarded secret because the US military refused to disclose its satellite’s capabilities, weather.com said.
But on April 7 of this year, the US Space Command shared a thread on Twitter, in which chief scientist Joel Mozer reviewed classified data and confirmed the meteor’s interstellar trajectory.
According to scientists, the meteorite is only slightly larger than a microwave. Most of it probably burned up when it entered Earth’s atmosphere, and the surviving fragments plummeted into the depths of the Pacific Ocean, sciencetimes.com said.