Confirmed! The 2014 meteor is the first known interstellar visitor to Earth
Astronomers have confirmed that a suspected space rock that hit Earth in 2014 came from another star system, three years before the famous interstellar visitor Oumuamu.
Researchers found a meteor in the catalog by NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) in 2019. At the time, however, some data about the rock’s trajectory was kept secret by the US Department of Defense (DoD), whose sensors collected it.
But in March of this year, the Ministry of Defense released a statement confirming the measurements, allowing scientists to complete their calculation of the origin of the mysterious rock.
mini-an asteroidwho entered Earth’s atmosphere On January 8, 2014, it arrived at a very high speed of 216,000 km/h. It also followed a strange trajectory, suggesting it may have come from outside Solar system. By modeling the rock’s trajectory in the past and estimating its gravitational interactions with the planets in the solar system, the authors of the new paper confirmed that the tiny asteroid was indeed a newcomer to the solar system. the sunfrom the corner milky way galaxy.
Related: Interstellar objects may have crashed on the Moon
The confirmation makes the rock, named CNEOS 2014-01-08, the first known visitor from interstellar space, predating the famous 650-foot-wide (200 m) asteroid ‘Oumuamua which flew past Earth in 2017. Just a year later, astronomers discovered a second interstellar object, a 1,650-foot-wide (0.5 km) Comet Borisov. The short interval between those discoveries has led astronomers to believe that smaller interstellar rocks, only feet or tens of feet wide, must be much more common in the solar system and even intersect regularly with our planet.
That is why the authors of the new paper, the famous Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb and his colleague Amir Siraj, set out to search the CNEOS catalog. In addition to CNEOS 2014-01-08, they found another promising one meteor, for which the necessary data are nonetheless confidential. That space rock cut through Earth’s atmosphere in March 2017.
Researchers believe that interstellar space rocks could hit Earth’s atmosphere about once a decade. Analysis of those meteors could provide new insight into the chemistry of distant ones, according to the researchers in the paper star systems.
“By extrapolating the trajectory of each meteor back in time and analyzing the relative abundance of chemical isotopes of each meteor, it is possible to compare the meteors to their parent stars and reveal insights into the formation of the planetary system,” the authors said in paper (opens in new tab). “[Some chemical] elements can be detected in the atmospheres of stars, so their abundances in meteor spectra can serve as important links to their parent stars.”
Because most meteoroids burn up in the atmosphere before reaching Earth’s surface, and because retrieving those that do is extremely time-consuming and challenging on a technical levelresearchers propose creating a worldwide network of cameras capable of spectroscopic measurements, analyzing the light absorption fingerprints of incoming space rocks that could reveal their chemical composition.
CNEOS 2014-01-08 exploded over the ocean near Papua New Guinea, Siraj told Space.com in an email, and scientists believe some pieces of rock may have survived the trip through Earth’s atmosphere and fallen into the sea. Siraj and Loeb are planning an expedition to try to recover some of the fragments next year.
The researchers also suggest that such a high frequency of interstellar visitors throughout Earth’s history could mean that the seeds of life that germinated on our planet over the past 3.5 billion years may have come from another star system.
Study (opens in new tab) was published Nov. 2 in the Astrophysical Journal.
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