Confirmed! A 2014 meteor is Earth’s first known interstellar visitor
Astronomers have confirmed that a suspicious space rock that hit Earth in 2014 came from a different galaxy, three years older than the famous interstellar visitor ‘Oumuamua.
Researchers found the meteor in the catalog from NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) in 2019. At that time, however, some data on the rock’s trajectory was kept secret by the United States Department of Defense (DoD), whose sensors they collected.
But in March this year, the DoD released a statement confirming the measurements, allowing scientists to complete their calculation of the mysterious rock’s origin.
The 3-foot-wide (0.9 meters) miniasteroidwho came in the Earth’s atmosphere on January 8, 2014, arrived at a very high speed of 134,200 mph (216,000 km/h). It also followed a strange trajectory, suggesting that from outside the solar system. By modeling the rock’s past path and assessing its gravitational interactions with planets in the solar system, the authors of the new paper confirmed that the small asteroid was indeed a newcomer to the planet. Sun‘s corner of the Milky Way universe.
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 that flew past Earth in 2017. Just a year later, astronomers discovered the second interstellar object, the 1,650-foot-wide (0.5 km) comet Borisov. The short interval between those discoveries led astronomers to believe that smaller interstellar rocks, only a few meters or tens of feet wide, must be much more common in the solar system and even regularly intersect our planet.
So the authors of the new paper, famed 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 meteor, for which the necessary data is yet to be classified. That space rock cut through Earth’s atmosphere in March 2017.
The researchers believe that interstellar space rocks can hit Earth’s atmosphere about once every decade. Analyzing those meteors, the researchers suggest in the paper, could yield new insights into the chemistry from afar star systems.
“By extrapolating the trajectory of each meteor back in time and analyzing the relative abundances of each meteor’s chemical isotopes, one can align meteors with their parent stars and reveal insights into the formation of planetary systems,” the authors said in the report. paper (opens in new tab). “[Some chemical] elements can be detected in the atmospheres of stars, so their abundance in meteor spectra can serve as important links with parent stars.”
Because most meteoroids in the atmosphere burn up before reaching the Earth’s surface, and because retrieving the meteoroids is extremely time consuming and challenging technicallythe researchers propose creating a global camera network that can take spectroscopic measurements, analyzes of the light absorption fingerprints of arriving space rocks that could reveal their chemical makeup.
CNEOS 2014-01-08 exploded over the ocean near Papua New Guinea, Siraj told Space.com in an email, and the scientists believe some pieces of the rock may have prevented the journey through Earth’s atmosphere. survived and fell into the sea. Siraj and Loeb are planning an expedition to try and retrieve some of the fragments next year.
The researchers also suggest that such a high frequency of interstellar visitors in Earth’s history could mean that the seeds of life sprouted on our planet over the past 3.5 billion years may have come from another galaxy.
The study (opens in new tab) was published Nov. 2 in the Astrophysical Journal.
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