A fireball flew over the Pacific.
It happened on January 8, 2014. At that moment, a mysterious fireball lit up the sky above Papua New Guinea. No one expected the flyby of a space body around our planet. The incident then began to be investigated by the US Space Command. The declassified documents now claim that it was a fast-moving object from another star system.
The only witnesses to the meter-sized overflight of the rock, which burned in our atmosphere with an energy comparable to about 110 tons of TNT, were sensors from a classified US government satellite designed to detect foreign missile launches. .
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They revealed that the body flew into space at a speed of more than 210 thousand km / h. However, this far exceeds the average speed of meteors flying through the Solar System. “Anything that moves faster than about 42 kilometers per second can come from interstellar space,” explains astrophysicist Amir Siraj. “That’s why we calculated the object’s trajectory, which took into account the gravitational effects of our Sun and its planets.”
Papua New Guinea asteroid
Using computer models, the scientists found that before the object hit our atmosphere, it accelerated to a staggering 60 km / s. “This was clear evidence that the fireball was the first interstellar meteor ever discovered,” says Siraj.
Source: Youtube
Calculations suggested that the body was ejected from the depths of another planetary system, relatively close to its star. This fact surprised the experts. “We naively thought that most interstellar objects came from far more distant circumstellar regions, such as the comet clouds found at the edges of many galaxies,” admits the astrophysicist.
The astrophysicist and virtuoso of the piano Amir Siraj.
The results of the study were so controversial that most scientific journals refused to publish them. They haven’t even passed a professional review. Amir Siraj then enlisted the help of Alan Hurd and Matt Heavner, a scientist with safety clearance at Los Alamos National Laboratory and an anonymous US government employee, who obtained confidential data for comparison.
First visitor from afar
It wasn’t until this spring that the body was officially recognized as the first known interstellar meteor to be detected in the Solar System. Within three years, he overtook the mysterious Oumuamua object, known for its cigar shape.
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Currently, scientists are speculating where exactly the remnants of the fireball might have landed. “A meteorite ignited in the South Pacific Ocean. Its debris is likely to have become entangled on the sea floor. If an expedition was organized, we could track and analyze the samples,” Siraj thinks.
Source:
www.scientificamerican.com, www.denik.cz, www.interez.sk
