A series of previously secret documents released by the United States Space Command (USSC) confirm the fall of a meteor from another star system on Earth. In 2014, the object lit up the skies over Papua New Guinea, Oceania, before crashing into the sea, where it potentially left debris.
In space observations, “object from another star system” is a term applied to celestial bodies outside our solar system. The mere appearance of one of them in our neighborhood in space is already a rarity: publicly, we were only aware of two of them – the 1I/ʻOumuamua in 2017 and the 2I/Borisov in 2019, and none of them came close to us.
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After the release of the material, Siraj spoke to an American portal about the fact that the study has been in “a peer review process for years, strangely tied up by the unusual circumstances and the originality of the discovery, as well as the obstacles imposed by the involvement of information and confidential US government entities.
“I had the pleasure of signing a memorandum with USSC Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Mozer, to confirm that a previously detected interstellar object was, in fact, coming from another star system, a confirmation that has helped the astronomical community at large,” the agency said on Twitter, quoting a statement from Lieutenant General John E. Shaw of the United States Forces. United States Armed Forces. Shaw is the acting commander of the USSC.
“I laugh at the fact that we have interstellar material dumped on Earth, and that we know where it is,” said Siraj, who now serves as director of interstellar object studies at the Galileo Project at Harvard. “One thing we’ve definitely been checking out — and I’ve been talking to a few people about — is the possibility that we might look for any fragments on the ocean floor off the coast of Papua New Guinea.”
The scientist, however, recognizes that this would be quite complicated, considering that the meteor’s descent into the atmosphere burned it, so any bits that have fallen to our surface (meteorites) are probably quite small and difficult to track – if there is any. . Siraj said that in space, the meteor was no more than “a few meters” across.
“It was too fast, so I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, this could be an interstellar meteor,’” Siraj said. “It was as if he was hiding in plain sight. It wasn’t like we had to dig very deep into that base. It was more a case that since we hadn’t seen an object from another star system since 2017, no one had any reason to think there might be meteors from outside the solar system.”
According to him, at the time of sending the study, the two astrophysicists, inspired by the discovery of 1I/ʻOumuamua, decided to review an entire database related to impacts of space objects against Earth, maintained by NASA. At that base, a specific shock jumped to their eyes – which took place on January 8, 2014 near Manus Island – due to its unusual speed of just over 209,000 kilometers per hour (km/h).
After doing all the data analysis, Siraj and Loeb wrote the article that was submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters, a reputable scientific publication, but the study was tied up by the fact that some technical information in the database was censored by the Department of Defense ( DoD) of the US.
The reason for this was much more technological than scientific, in fact: some of the sensors used to measure terminal velocities of objects coming from space use resources that are also applied by the DoD to detect and measure information from enemy missiles and even nuclear weapons. Because of this, there is a kind of prior confidentiality in information detected by these instruments that prevented the two scientists from analyzing all the information of their discovery.
In new documentation released by the USSC (which Siraj only learned about thanks to a tweet from a scientist), the agency states that the “terminal velocity of the object from another star system is very close to NASA’s estimates”. Now Siraj is making requests to see the full publication of the original study so that other scientists in the field can use it as a bibliographic basis for further research.
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