Scientists plan to recover the remains of an interstellar visitor, the first to land on Earth – teach me about science

Astronomers plan to recover the remains of an interstellar visitor, the first massive object to reach our planet. It’s a meteorite that crashed into the Pacific Ocean, comes from another star system and hit Earth in 2014.

Such a meteorite called CNEOS 2014-01-08, which according to data collected by scientists before its impact on Earth, is the first interstellar object to come from outside our solar system. Investigation A recent report says that this year the US Department of Defense verified that “the velocity estimate reported by NASA is accurate enough to indicate an interstellar trajectory,” making the object the first interstellar object discovered and the first interstellar meteorite discovered.

Notify us earlier After a fireball crossed the skies of Papua New Guinea in 2014, confidential data prevented scientists from verifying their discovery for 3 years. But it was finally revealed that it was a meteorite, the first known interstellar object to date. In the new studio, researchers discuss the compositional and dynamic properties of CNEOS 2014-01-08; In addition, they described their expedition plan to recover meteorite fragments from the ocean floor.

study 2019, The first to detail the event, he also mentions that the average velocity of meteors orbiting within the solar system is less than the average velocity of the object in question. For this reason, he cannot be a close visitor. The discovery even predates the controversial and popular ‘Oumuamua’ discovery, making 2014 the first known meteorite and interstellar object to have been discovered in our solar system.

CNEOS 2014-01-08 is thought to have come from another system because of the high speed it was traveling at, 60 kilometers per second, something too fast for our Sun’s gravity. When an object is moving at a speed of more than 42 kilometers per second, then it is in hyperbolic balance. Since the meteorite’s speed is known to exceed this figure, it is considered to be coming from a place outside our solar system.

A Harvard team led by Amir Siraj and Abraham Loeb from Project Galileo, as this underwater mission to hunt this meteorite is called, aims to find fragments of CNEOS 2014-01-08, a rock that owes its name to the date of its crash on Earth on January 8, 2014 near the coast of Papua New Guinea in the Pacific Ocean. The team noted that if this mission succeeds, it would mark the first time humans have been in direct contact with an object larger than interstellar dust.

The meteorite far exceeded the resistance of typical iron, which means that it does not easily deform or damage under load, which facilitates the goal of the project, which is to salvage as much of this meteorite as possible, as it contains enough iron to stick to a magnet with a high probability that the fragments of this rock are magnetic . This fits perfectly with the plans of the team responsible for the Galileo mission.

The mission consists of using a type of magnetic sled that will be towed to the sea floor 1.7 km away for 10 days, in the hope that the magnets will be able to recover fragments of the meteorite up to 0.1 mm in diameter. In terms of financing, the Galileo project already has half a million dollars, although another 1.1 million is needed to complete this task, which is why it is not clear when this project will be implemented. If completed successfully, it will be the first interstellar meteorite to hit Earth and its composition will be studied in detail, possibly giving us information about the environment and where it comes from.

The search appears on the pre-print site ArXiv.