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US officials confirmed Wednesday that a small space rock that traveled across the skies of Papua New Guinea in 2014 before crashing off the northeast coast was actually a meteorite spewing from another solar system.
The meteorite, known as CNEOS 2014-01-08, landed on January 8, 2014. It was already identified as an interstellar meteorite in a 2019 study co-written by Amir Siraj, then an undergraduate at Harvard University, and Abraham Loeb, professor Science at Harvard University.
But it wasn’t confirmed that it was an interstellar meteorite until the US Space Command issued a document on discovery.
In the document, US Space Force Lieutenant General John Shaw said officials reviewed additional data related to the Siraj and Loeb discovery and “confirmed that the velocity estimate reported by NASA is accurate enough to indicate an interstellar path.”
Siraj wrote about his findings in a Scientific American article Posted on Tuesday.
“CNEOS’ 2014 Manus Island fireball entry indicates that the meteor hit Earth’s atmosphere at 45 kilometers per second – which is very promising,” he said.
“However, some of this velocity came from the motion of the body relative to the Earth and the motion of the Earth around the Sun. Breaking down these effects with the help of computer programs I wrote, I found that the object had overtaken the Earth from behind by hitting our atmosphere, and its relative velocity to the Sun is likely closer to 60 kilometers per second.”
Over the next several months, Siraj and Loeb worked to publish their work in a journal, but repeatedly ran into obstacles because their data came from a NASA database that does not reveal certain information, such as how accurate the readings are.
That changed a few weeks ago when they managed to get confirmation from Shaw.
CNEOS 2014-01-08 is the first interstellar meteor to hit Earth, but it’s not the only one. The Oumuamua interstellar meteorite was discovered in 2017, and Borisov was discovered in 2018.
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