The meteorite, believed to be from beyond the solar system, crashed into the ocean in 2014.
A meteorite believed to be from beyond the solar system crashed into the ocean in 2014 off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Scientists have launched an expedition into the ocean depths to search for the space rock, as it is only the third known object of its kind, a Science Times report said. The two pthers – Oumuamua and Borisov – landed on Earth in 2017 and 2018, the publication also writes.
Oumuamua is about 100 meters long, while Borisov is between 0.4 and 1 kilometer long. These objects are the earliest known interstellar objects. However, it was later determined that a meteorite that crashed in the southwest Pacific predated these two.
According to weather.com, Harvard professor Avi Loeb and graduate student Amir Sirai were the first to recognize the likely interstellar origin of the meteor, which they named CNEOS 2014-01-08. They arrived at this result by analyzing the tracks of the half-meter-wide object; its remarkably high heliocentric velocity suggests that it is not attracted by our Sun’s gravity.
However, due to a lack of information, the scientific community refused to officially designate CNEOS 2014-01-08 as an interstellar object. This was because the data used to calculate the meteor’s impact on Earth was collected by a US Department of Defense satellite. The exact values of the measurement error have also become a closely guarded secret, as the US military has refused to disclose its satellite’s capabilities, weather.com also said.
But a thread was shared on Twitter on April 7 of this year by the United States Space Command in which the chief scientist, Joel Moser, reviewed the classified data and confirmed the interstellar trajectory of the meteor.
According to scientists, the meteorite is only slightly larger than a microwave oven. Most of it most likely burned up when it entered Earth’s atmosphere, and the surviving fragments fell into the depths of the Pacific Ocean, sciencetimes.com said.
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