US officials confirm first known interstellar meteor hit Earth in 2014

US officials confirmed on Wednesday that a small space rock that passed through the skies of Papua New Guinea in 2014 before crashing into the northeast coast was in fact a meteorite traveling from another solar system.

The meteorite, known as CNEOS 2014-01-08, landed on January 8, 2014. It was actually identified as an interstellar meteor in a 2019 study co-authored by Amir Siraj. , then an undergraduate student at Harvard University, and Abraham Loeb, a professor of science at Harvard.

But it was not confirmed as an interstellar meteorite until the US Space Command issued a document about discovery.

In the document, US Space Force Lieutenant General John Shaw said officials reviewed additional data related to Siraj and Loeb’s findings and “confirmed that the velocity estimate reported to NASA is precise enough to show interstellar orbits.”

Siraj wrote about his findings in a American scientific articles published on Tuesday.

“The CNEOS entry for the Manus Island fireball in 2014 indicates that the meteorite hit Earth’s atmosphere at about 45 km/s – very promising,” he said.

“However, some of this speed comes from the object’s motion relative to the Earth and the Earth’s motion around the sun. Blur these effects with the help of computer programs that I use. wrote, I find that the object that has passed Earth from behind before hitting our atmosphere and possibly has a solar relative speed of close to 60 km/s.”

Over the next few months, Siraj and Loeb worked to get their work published in a journal, but repeatedly hit a snag because their data came from a NASA database that didn’t reveal some information. certain, such as the accuracy of the readings.

That changed weeks before they were able to get confirmation from Shaw.

CNEOS 2014-01-08 was the first interstellar meteorite to hit Earth, but it wasn’t the only one. The interstellar meteorite Oumuamua was discovered in 2017 and Borisov was discovered in 2018.

at Blogtuan.info – Source: nbcnews.com – Read the original article here