A fireball that shot up in the sky of Papua New Guinea in 2014 was actually a fast-moving object from another star system, according to last note Released by the US Space Command (USSC).
The object is a small meteorite just 1.5 ft (0.45 m) long on Earth’s atmosphere on January 8, 2014, after traveling through space at more than 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h) – a speed well exceeding the average velocity of meteorites at which It orbits the solar system, according to a 2019 study of the object published in the arXiv preprint database.
A 2019 study argued that the meteor’s small velocity, combined with the trajectory of its orbit, established with 99 percent certainty that the object originated far from our own. The Solar System—possibly “from the deep interior of a planetary system or star in the thick disk of the Milky Way galactic,” the authors wrote.
But despite the near-certainty, the team’s paper was never reviewed or published in a scientific journal, as some of the data needed to verify their calculations was deemed to be classified by the US government, Deputy said.
Related: What happens in intergalactic space?
Now, USSC scientists have officially confirmed the team’s findings. In a memo dated March 1 and posted to Twitter on April 6, Lieutenant General John E. Shaw, deputy commander of the US Security Council, wrote that the 2019 fireball analysis was “accurate enough to confirm the interstellar path.”
The note added that this retrospective confirmation makes the 2014 meteorite the first interstellar object to be discovered in our solar system.
The object’s discovery precedes the discovery of “Oumuamua – a notorious cigar-shaped object that also moves too fast to have originated in our solar system – by three years, according to a USSC memo.” (Unlike the 2014 meteor, Oumuamua has been detected far from Earth and is already exiting the Solar System, according to NASA.)
Amir Siraj, a theoretical astrophysicist at Harvard University and lead author of the 2019 paper, told Vice that he still intends to publish the original study, so the scientific community can pick up where he and his colleagues left off. He added that due to the meteor igniting over the South Pacific, it is possible that the body fragments fell into the water and have since settled to the sea floor.
While finding these pieces of interstellar debris may be a near impossible task, Siraj said he is already consulting with experts about the possibility of an expedition to retrieve them.
“The possibility of acquiring the first piece of interstellar matter is exciting enough to check it out thoroughly and talk to all of the world’s experts on ocean voyages to recover meteorites,” Siraj told Vice.
Read more about the 2014 meteor at Vice.com.
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This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.