Astronomers are planning a fishing trip to land an alien intruder on Earth: a small meteorite from another star system that slammed into the Pacific Ocean with an energy of about 121 tons (110 tons) of TNT.
The Harvard University team is hoping to find fragments of this interstellar rock — known as CNEOS 2014-01-08 — that crashed into it Earth on January 8, 2014.
“Finding such a fragment would be the first contact mankind has ever had with material larger than dust from the afterlife solar system,” Amir Siraj, an astrophysicist at Harvard University and the first author of a new article to be published in the non-peer-reviewed pre-print service ArXiv (opens in new tab) on CNEOS 2014-01-08, Live Science said in an email.
Siraj identified the object’s interstellar origin in 2019 to learn (opens in new tab) with 99.999% confidence, but it wasn’t until May 2022 that it was confirmed to Siraj by the US Space Command. There are no known witnesses to the object’s impact on Earth.
“It hit the atmosphere about a hundred miles away [160 kilometers] off the coast of Papua New Guinea in the middle of the night with about 1% of the energy of the Hiroshima bomb‘ Sirai said.
Related: What are the largest impact craters on earth?
With a width of just 0.5 m (1.5 feet), CNEOS 2014-01-08 now appears to have been the first interstellar object ever discovered in our solar system.
Formerly called an elongated object ‘Oumuamua bore this title. The space rock, discovered during the Pan-STARRS all-sky survey in 2017, was hurtling through our solar system at almost 57,000 mph (92,000 km/h), and later Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, a colleague of Siraj’s, claimed this to be the case could an alien machine. Oumuamua’s discovery was followed in 2019 by Comet 2I/Borisov, the first interstellar comet discovered in Crimea by amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov.
CNEOS 2014-01-08 is believed to be from a different star system, as it was traveling at 37.2 miles per second (60 kilometers per second) relative to that Sun. That’s too fast to be bound by the sun heaviness.
“At Earth’s distance from the Sun, every object is moving faster than about 42 kilometers per second [26 miles per second] is on an infinite hyperbolic escape trajectory relative to the Sun,” Siraj said. “This means that CNEOS 2014-01-08 significantly exceeded the local speed limit for bound objects [and] it didn’t cross any other planets along the way, so it must have come from outside the solar system.”
Cut to Siraj and Loeb’s Galileo project, a $1.6 million expedition to build a magnet with dimensions similar to a king-size bed at 1.3 degrees South, 147.6 degrees East, the US Department of Defense location , on which the meteorite rests. That’s about 186 miles (300 km) north of Manus Island in the Bismarck Sea in the Southwest Pacific.
CNEOS 2014-01-08 far exceeded the thickness of a typical iron meteorite, which Siraj says should make recovery even easier. Material strength refers to how easily something can resist being deformed or damaged by a load. “Most meteorites contain enough iron to stick to the kind of magnets we want to use for the ocean expedition,” he said. “Given the extremely high material strength, it is very likely that the fragments of CNEOS 2014-01-08 are ferromagnetic.”
From Papua New Guinea, the Galileo project vessel would use a magnetic sled on a longline winch, towed 1.7 km (1 mile) across the seabed for 10 days. It is hoped that the magnet can recover tiny fragments of the meteorite, just 0.1 mm (0.004 inches) in diameter.
However, it is unclear when the astronomers can start their expedition. The Galileo project has already pledged US$500,000 and needs an additional US$1.1 million to make it a reality. According to Siraj, this is a good value compared to a space mission.
“The alternative way to study an interstellar object up close is to launch a space mission to a future object flying through Earth’s neighborhood,” said Siraj, who is also working out the details of such a mission with Loeb another object like “Oumuamua appear in the solar system. “But that would be 1,000 times more expensive at around $1 billion.”
Originally published on Live Science.
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