Astronomers have confirmed that a suspicious space rock that hit Earth in 2014 came from another star system, three years preceding the famous stellar visitor ‘Oumuamua.
Researchers I found the meteorite in the catalog from NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) in 2019. However, at that time, some data about the trajectory of the rocks was kept secret by the US Department of Defense (DoD), collected by sensors.
But in March of this year, the Department of Defense released a statement confirming the measurements, allowing scientists to complete their calculations of the mysterious rock’s origin.
Small width 3 feet (0.9 meters)asteroidthat entered Earth’s atmosphere On January 8, 2014, the speed reached 134,200 mph (216,000 km/h). It also followed a strange path, indicating that it might have come from outside Solar System. By modeling the trajectories of rocks in the past and evaluating their gravitational interactions with planets in the solar system, the authors of the new paper confirmed that the small asteroid was indeed a newcomer to the planet. the suncorner Milky Way galaxy.
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The confirmation makes the rock, named CNEOS 2014-01-08, the first known visitor from interstellar space, predating the famous 650-foot-wide (200-meter) asteroid’أوOumuamua that surpassed Earth in 2017. Just a year later, astronomers discovered the second interstellar object, which is 1,650 feet (0.5 km) wide. Comet Borisov. The short period between these discoveries has led astronomers to believe that smaller interstellar rocks, no more than feet or tens of feet wide, must be more common in the Solar System and even along regular paths with our planet.
That’s why the authors of the new research paper, renowned Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb and colleague Amir Siraj, set out to search the CNEOS catalog. In addition to CNEOS 2014-01-08, they found another promising meteor, for which the necessary data is still confidential. Those space rocks cut off Earth’s atmosphere in March 2017.
Researchers believe that interstellar space rocks may hit Earth’s atmosphere once every decade. In the paper, the researchers suggest that analysis of these meteorites could provide new insights into the chemistry of distant lands star systems.
“By extrapolating each meteorite’s path back in time and analyzing the relative abundance of each meteorite’s chemical isotopes, one can match meteorites to parent stars and reveal insights into the composition of the planetary system,” the authors said in the article. sheet (Opens in a new tab). “[Some chemical] Elements can be detected in the atmosphere of stars, so their abundance in the spectra of meteorites could serve as important connections to parent stars.”
Because most meteorites burn up in the atmosphere before they reach the Earth’s surface, and because it takes a very long time to recover those meteorites. Technical challengeThe researchers propose creating a global network of cameras capable of performing spectroscopic measurements, analyzes of the light-absorbing fingerprints of incoming space rocks that could reveal their chemical composition.
CNEOS 2014-01-08 has exploded over the ocean near Papua New Guinea, Siraj told Space.com in an email, and scientists believe some pieces of rock may have survived the journey through Earth’s atmosphere and fallen into the sea. Siraj and Loeb are planning an expedition to try to recover some of the fragments next year.
The researchers also suggest that such a high frequency of interstellar visitors throughout Earth’s history could mean that the seeds of life that sprouted on our planet in the past 3.5 billion years may have come from another star system.
the study (Opens in a new tab) It was published November 2 in The Astrophysical Journal.
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