Astronomers plan to find a meteorite in the ocean using a huge magnet

Thursday August 11, 2022 07:20 AM

Astronomers are planning a trip to find a small meteorite from another star system using a huge magnet, which collided with the Pacific Ocean, with an energy equivalent to about 121 tons of TNT, and the team from Harvard University hopes to find parts of these interstellar rocks, known as CNEOS 2014-01-08, which hit Earth years ago on January 8, 2014.

According to “space”, Amir Siraj, an astrophysicist at Harvard University and the first researcher for a research paper, said, “Finding such a piece would represent humanity’s first ever contact with material larger than dust from outside the solar system.”

“It hit the atmosphere about a hundred miles (160 kilometers) off the coast of Papua New Guinea in the middle of the night, with about 1% of the energy of a Hiroshima bomb,” Siraj said.

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CNEOS 2014-01-08 is only 1.5 feet (0.5 meters) wide and now appears to be the first interstellar object discovered in our Solar System.

CNEOS 2014-01-08 is believed to be from another star system because it was traveling at 37.2 miles per second (60 kilometers per second) with respect to the Sun, too fast to be constrained by the Sun’s gravity.

Siraj explained: “At the Earth’s distance from the Sun, any object travels faster than about 42 kilometers per second [26 ميلًا في الثانية] be on an infinite escape path with respect to the sun.”

Source: Technology: Astronomers plan to find a meteor in the ocean using a huge magnet

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