Martin Deja via Getty Images
Space – the discovery went almost unnoticed in 2014. At that time, there was an object Interstellar crashed into our planet. A meteor was seen blazing in the sky near Papua New Guinea, and is likely to end its course in the South Pacific.
Until today, the note about this event has been kept secret by the United States government andUS space Request. However, on April 7 this branch of the Pentagon published a press release confirming the discovery of the first interstellar meteorite ever observed.
6/ “I had the pleasure of signing a memorandum with Tweet embedChief Scientist, Dr. Moser, to confirm that a previously discovered interstellar object was indeed an interstellar object, an assertion that helped the broader astronomical community. ” pic.twitter.com/PGlIonCSrW
– US Space Command (@US_SpaceCom) 7 April 2022
This note thus enables the study conducted jointly by the researchers Amir Siraj And Abraham Loeb, published in 2019, to finally receive peer review and publication. In fact, validation of their research was previously crippled by the unprecedented nature of the discovery that some of the data had not been relayed by US authorities.
Unidentified object from afar
The discovery of the meteorite, which was only a few feet wide, comes on the heels of recent discoveries of two other interstellar objects from our planet. solar systemknown as Oumuamua in 2017 and Borisov in 2019, which were much larger and were not in close contact with Earth.
At that time, the discovery of Oumuamua gave rise to many theories, introducing the interstellar object as a strange ship. However, it turned out that the star was no less than a part of a planet from another solar system.
In the wake of Oumuamua’s discovery, Amir Siraj and co-author Abraham Loeb were inspired to search for potential interstellar fireballs. Then they discovered an object that exploded near Manus Island on January 8, 2014 at an unusual speed, exceeding 130,000 miles per hour. This speed according to researchers Mark “a possible origin from the deep interior of a planetary system or star in the thick disk of the Milky Way”.
treasure for knowledge
Amir Siraj told vice. The latter now wants to try to recover potential debris from the body. “One thing I’m going to check, and I’m already talking to people, is if it’s possible to search the ocean floor off Papua New Guinea and see if we can get any fragments.”
However, the odds of finding this interstellar object are slim, since it is possible that all the remnants of the fireball landed in small quantities in a disparate region of the South Pacific Ocean, which makes finding them even more difficult.
“It’s going to be a big task, but we’re going to look at it very carefully because the possibility of getting the first piece of interstellar material is exciting enough to check it out accurately and talk to all the ocean voyages experts in the world of meteorite recovery,” The researcher explains.
Discover invites others
This interstellar meteorite is a sign that the Solar System could be inundated with material from other star systems, and even other galaxies, which could be discovered by future research. Such efforts could offer glimpses of worlds beyond our Milky Way, while there may be veritable interstellar treasures to be discovered on our own planet.
“Because of the rarity of interstellar meteors, meteors outside the galaxy will be even rarer,” Amir Siraj says of Naib. The latter adds, however, “We will not find anything in the future unless we look for it. We, as scientists, can build a network as wide as a network sensors the United States government, and to use it for scientific purposes and to make full use of the atmosphere.”
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