An interstellar object crashed to Earth on January 8, 2014, in the Pacific Ocean. The historic feat was once a rumor investigated by scientists, but was eventually confirmed by the Pentagon, the US military high command, in an official memorandum.
The Space Command report, previously classified, recorded a fireball off the coast of Papua New Guinea. The impact likely scattered other debris in the region, according to the record.
5/ From the @AsteroidWatch tabletop exercise earlier this year, we learned that as long as the simulated asteroid was in the space domain, #USSPACECOM was the supported combatant command within the @DeptofDefense.
— U.S. Space Command (@US_SpaceCom) April 6, 2022
The impact marks the first fall of an object from outside the Solar System onto the planet. Retroactively, it is also the first object of its kind to pass through our planetary system — before the very-recorded Oumuamua, seen in late 2017.
The object was about 0.45 m and traveled to the planet at 210 thousand km/h. The hypothesis that the impact was caused by an interstellar object is not new, and has already been investigated by two Harvard researchers — who published a paper on the possibility in 2019.
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“One thing I’m going to check … is if it’s possible to scour the ocean floor off the coast of Papua New Guinea and see if we can get any fragments of the object,” said Amir Siraj, a Harvard researcher and one of the study’s authors, in an interview with site Vice.
Despite his hope, he acknowledges that looking for small pieces of rocky material on the ocean floor is not the easiest of tasks.
The study by Siraj and his advisor, Avi Loeb, has not yet been scientifically reviewed because the discovery was shrouded in bureaucracy and secrecy at the highest levels of the US Department of Defense. With the tweet confirming the discovery, the way is open for a review of the duo’s article.
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