A new memo released by the U.S. Space Command confirms that a meteor that struck Earth in January 2014 did indeed come from another solar system, making it the first known interstellar object to date.
NASA data reportedly showed that the rocky meteor, which is just 1.5 feet (0.45 meters) in diameter, illuminated the sky near Manus Island in Papua New Guinea on January 8, 2014, while flying at more than 100,000 miles per hour.
Scientists believe that the January 2014 meteor may have left interstellar debris in the South Pacific.
Scientists believe it may have left interstellar debris in the South Pacific, and if these fragments are recovered, it could reveal more about the source of this rocky object.
However, much of the information surrounding the meteor has until now been classified by the U.S. government.
The memo posted by U.S. Space Command on social media twitter was posted on March 1 this year by Deputy Commander John F. Kennedy. Lieutenant General E. Shaw signed the results of the study by Dr. Joel Mozer, chief scientist of space command.
Back in 2019, researchers at Harvard University published a study on the preprint server arXiv, pointing to the existence of a meteor and saying it came from outside the solar system.
The January 2014 meteor flew at more than 100,000 miles per hour, suggesting it was an object originating outside the solar system.
According to the authors, the study has been awaiting peer review for years in order to confirm this claim, but it has encountered resistance from the U.S. government, which withholds key information from publicly available NASA databases.
Amir Siraj, one of the study's authors, said he wanted to track fragments of the object that might be at the bottom of the ocean.
He said the meteor's high velocity meant it could come from the deep interior of the planetary system or from a star in the Milky Way's thick disk. High velocity is an indicator of an object originating outside the solar system, because if it is bound by its orbit around the sun, its speed will be much slower.
The Oumuamua, which was observed in October 2017, was even thought to be a starship of an alien civilization.
The discovery reportedly means that Oumuamua, which was observed in October 2017, has been relegated to being the second interstellar object to be detected.
The object was originally classified as a comet and later reclassified as an asteroid because it lacked a comet tail, a cloud of gas surrounding the comet's nucleus.
The third known interstellar object to be discovered is a comet called 2I/Borisov, discovered by Crimean amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov with a telescope in August 2019, when it passed by the sun.
Scientists announced last year that 2I/Borisov was one of the "most primitive comets" ever observed, meaning it wasn't altered by the heat and radiation of stars like our sun.
Text/Nandu reporter Chen Lin