One meteor traveled quite a long way from home to visit Earth. Researchers discovered the first known interstellar meteor to ever hit Earth, according to a recently released the United States Space Command document.
An interstellar meteor is a space rock that originates from outside our solar system — a rare occurrence. This one is known as CNEOS 2014-01-08, and it crash-landed along the northeast coast of Papua New Guinea on January 8, 2014.
The finding came as a surprise to Amir Siraj, who identified the object as an interstellar meteor in a 2019 study he coauthored while an undergraduate at Harvard University. The object, a small meteorite measuring just 1.5 feet (0.45 meter) across, slammed into Earth’s atmosphere on Jan. 8, 2014,
after traveling through space at more than 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h) — a speed that far exceeds the average velocity of meteors that orbit within the solar system, according to a 2019 study of the object published in the preprint database arXiv.
That 2019 study argued that the wee meteor’s speed, along with the trajectory of its orbit, proved with 99% certainty that the object had originated far beyond our solar system — possibly “from the deep interior of a planetary system or a star in the thick disk of the Milky Way galaxy,” the authors wrote.
But despite their near certainty, the team’s paper was never peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal, as some of the data needed to verify their calculations were considered classified by the U.S. government, according to Vice.
