Interstellar meteorite crashed to Earth?

In 2014, an object from another solar system crashed into our planet. It confirmed US Space Command, USSC (Unified Command of the US Armed Forces Responsible for Space) in a recent memo (See the tweet below). The story began when a fireball “caught” in our atmosphere, manifesting itself as a fireball over the sky of Papua New Guinea: its speed seemed anomalous compared to ordinary meteorites, but consistent with its interstellar origin.

in a thousand pieces. Amir Siraj, a researcher in astrophysics at Harvard University, after studying all the available data, came to formulate the hypothesis that the object must have come from another solar system and published his paper in 2019. He also argued that upon entering the atmosphere, it collapsed into a series of debris It is now located in the lower part of the South Pacific Ocean.

The document now published by the USSC fully supports this hypothesis, which would be truly revolutionary. Siraj stated that the study has been awaiting review by a scientific journal for several years, because – according to him – it would have been hampered by mysterious circumstances after the discovery and a series of obstacles related to the fact that some of the results of the information are “confidential.” by the United States government.

Ancestral. The discovery of a meteorite of possible interstellar origin, which must have been a few meters in diameter, is added to at least two other surveys of objects of similar origin, which appeared in our solar system: the first was أوOumuamuaand the second Comet Borisov. However, in both cases, there are significant differences: in fact, in comparison with the most recent meteorite, they are objects of much larger dimensions and, above all, did not come and will never come into contact with our planet.

conclusion. After searching the database of NASA’s Center for Near Object Studies (CNEOS, where the most important things that have affected Earth are recorded) and a series of calculations, Siraj, who is now director of studies on interstellar objects at Galileo, the Harvard Project came to the conclusion that the ball The fire that exploded near Manus Island on January 8, 2014, had a speed (more than 200,000 km / h) that can only be explained by the hypothesis that the object came from the outer edges of Manus Island. The solar system or, most likely, from another star.

“I am very excited just to think about the fact that there is interstellar matter on our planet and we also know where it is,” Siraj said. “And I think it’s a good idea to see if it’s possible to investigate the ocean floor off the coast of Papua New Guinea to find and recover that part.” All this despite the realization that the chances of finding that material are very low, given that it is torn to so many pieces.

The appeal. When Siraj made the discovery to Astrophysical Journal Letters The study was “frozen” pending CNEOS data, which has only now been declassified, while emphasizing that “the velocity estimate reported by the object is accurate enough to indicate an interstellar path.” Siraj now hopes that some researchers have studied the effect of the light left by this object and that he can advance to help understand more about the formation of the first interstellar object that would have reached Earth in living memory.