The first known interstellar meteor hit Earth in 2014, US officials say

U.S. officials have confirmed that a space rock that pierced the skies off the coast of Papua New Guinea in January 2014 was in fact an incredibly rare meteor originating beyond the solar system.

This meteor is known as CNEOS 2014-01-08. It made an emergency landing on January 8, 2014, but only last week government officials confirmed the origin of this space rock.

The meteor was identified as “interstellar” or beyond the solar system by Amir Siraj in 2019. At the time, Siraj, a Harvard student, was working to determine his findings with his academic adviser, Abraham Loeb, a professor of science at the university.

Siraj wrote about this process for Scientific American. He is studying what was then considered the first known interstellar meteor called Oumuamua, which was identified in October 2017.

Although he and Loeb were confident in their findings for CNEOS 2014-01-08 and that it was three years ahead of Oumuamua, scientific journals refused to publish their report because their data came from a NASA database that did not reveal a specific information.

Last Wednesday, U.S. Space Force Lt. Gen. John Shaw tweeted a note officially confirming their findings, saying “the speed estimate reported to NASA is accurate enough to indicate an interstellar trajectory.”

Officials used Siraj and Loeb’s findings, as well as additional information obtained from the US Department of Defense, to make this confirmation official.

The meteor from 2014 is now one of the three such interstellar meteors that have been confirmed so far, along with Oumuamua and the interstellar comet Borisov, writes Siraj in