Declassified data confirms that an interstellar object fell to Earth

A small meteor that swept over the sky of Papua New Guinea in 2014 and burned up in the Earth's atmosphere was a guest from another star system. This makes it the first known interstellar meteor, as recently declassified US government data has confirmed.

This discovery has an interesting backstory.

In 2017, scientists confirmed the discovery of the first interstellar object flying through the solar system. They named him 'Oumuamua (the image in the artist's view is on the cover of the article). Initially thought to be a comet, the object was reclassified a week later as an asteroid.

Some scholars have questioned its origin. There were many versions and hypotheses, including about a piece of dark matter and even an alien spacecraft.

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who is the author of a large number of diverse articles about 'Oumuamua, claimed that it was an example of light sail technology from a potential past galactic civilization. And its discovery was the first collision of mankind with an extraterrestrial artifact.

This version of the scientist is unlikely to ever be verified, but his other work turned out to be 100% correct. It's about articleDiscovery of a Meteor of Interstellar Origin Loeb and his co-author Amir Siraj, which was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters back in 2019. In it, they wrote that 'Oumuamua was preceded by another interstellar traveler that crashed into Earth's atmosphere in 2014.

To find out if any of these objects collided with the Earth (or at least flew by) they checked the observations registered in NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) catalog.

An interstellar object can only avoid the attraction of its own star due to the extremely high speed of movement, so scientists have narrowed their search to the fastest recorded objects.

Their attention was drawn to a fireball that burned up in the Earth's atmosphere over Papua New Guinea at 3:05 local time on January 8, 2014. He was moving at a speed of 216,000 kilometers per hour. This is much faster than the average meteor orbiting the solar system. This suggested that it was not associated with the Sun and very likely came "from the deep interior of a planetary system or a star in the thick disk of the Milky Way galaxy."

Scientists then wrote that its speed and trajectory proved with 99 percent certainty that the object came from outside the solar system.

Siraj and Loeb's article was not widely circulated and was not verified due to a lack of information that was suddenly withheld from the CNEOS database by the US government.

The fact is that some of the sensors used to detect near-Earth objects are under the jurisdiction of the Department of Defense. They can remove dubious or potentially dangerous information from access, which they did with the object in 2014.

Now, after several years of litigation and legal red tape trying to confirm the lost data, Siraj said that the meteor was confirmed by the US Space Command after all.

Memorandum dated March 1 saysthat "the velocity estimate provided by NASA is accurate enough to indicate an interstellar trajectory." Thus, it was the 2014 meteor that became the first confirmed interstellar object in our system instead of 'Oumuamua.

True, Oumuamua, unlike its predecessor, still exists and plows the expanses of the universe. In May 2018, he crossed the orbit of Jupiter, and in January 2019, the orbit of Saturn. Now he leaves the solar system.