A recent memo, released by the United States Space Command, showed a fireball that flashed across the sky over Papua New Guinea in 2014 was actually a fast-moving object from another galaxy (USSC).
According to a 2019 study of the object published in the preprint database arXiv, a small meteorite just 0.45 meters across slammed into Earth’s atmosphere on Jan. 8, 2014, after traveling through space at a speed of over 130,000 mph (210,000 km). /h) — a speed much greater than the average speed of meteors orbiting the solar system.
According to the authors of the 2019 study, the speed of the small meteor, combined with the trajectory of its orbit, proved with 99 percent certainty that the object originated far beyond our solar system.
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The team’s findings have now been officially confirmed by scientists at the USSC. Lieutenant General John E. Shaw, deputy commander of the USSC, wrote in a March 1 memo and shared on Twitter on April 6 that the analysis of the 2019 fireball was “accurate enough to confirm an interstellar trajectory.”
6/ “I had the pleasure of signing a memo with @ussfspoc‘s Chief Scientist, Dr. Mozer, to confirm that a previously detected interstellar object was indeed an interstellar object, a confirmation that has helped the wider astronomical community.” pic.twitter.com/PGlIONCSrW
— US Space Command (@US_SpaceCom) Apr 7, 2022
According to the memo, this confirmation makes the 2014 meteor the first interstellar object ever detected in our solar system. According to the USSC memo, the object’s discovery is three years earlier than the discovery of “Oumuamua,” a now famous cigar-shaped object that also moves far too fast to have formed in our solar system. (Unlike the 2014 meteor, ‘Oumuamua was discovered far away from Earth and is already escaping the Solar System, according to NASA.
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Amir Siraj, the lead author of the 2019 paper and a theoretical astrophysicist at Harvard University, told Vice he still plans to publish the original study so the scientific community can pick up where he and his colleagues left off. Because the meteorite exploded over the South Pacific, shards from the object may have spilled into the water and have been nesting on the seafloor ever since, he added.
Cover Image: NASA