Updated:
Save
On January 8, 2014, a small rock of just 45 cm exploded over the skies of Papua New Guinea after entering the earth’s atmosphere at full speed. At first, the event did not attract too much attention from astronomers, since there are many events of this type that happen every year. But time after, Amir Siraj Y Avi Loebboth from Harvard University, rescued the records of that atmospheric impact and verified that this meteorite had reached Earth at an extraordinary speed: 210,000 km/hwell above the typical of rocks native to our Solar system. In addition, the trajectory of its orbit made it clear that the rock ‘was not from here’, but had formed very far away, in some remote planetary system of a distant star.