New undersea mission planned to find the interstellar meteor that hit Mother Earth in 2014
From eclipses and supermoons to meteorites and asteroids, there are infinite celestial events that occur throughout the year. While some pass through the Earth and making us sit up and take notice, others often disappear mid-air or even crash into places that often remain unexplored by humans. Back in 2014, an interstellar meteorite smashed into the southwest Pacific Ocean off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Now, 8 years later, scientists have planned an underwater expedition to locate this space rock.
Wondering what interstellar meteorite is? It is a meteorite (shooting or falling star) that is found in an interstellar space (in between stars) but is not gravitationally bound to any star.
CNEOS 2014-01-08: The 2014 interstellar meteorite
What makes the 2014 interstellar meteorite it was the first to hit the Earth. It was followed by only two of its kinds: Oumuamua and Borisov, which landed on our home planet in 2017 and 2019 respectively.
Since the 2014 meteorite plummeted into the ocean, not much is known about it, except for the facts that it was not attracted to the Sun’s gravity, originated from the deep crust of the Milky Way’s planetary system and was half a metre wide. These earlier findings were recorded by a Harvard duo, Professor and veteran astronomer Avi Loeb and his graduate intern Amir Siraj, who were in fact the first to recognise the interstellar nature of the meteorite and even named it CNEOS 2014-01-08. However, in absence of sufficient information, the astronomer community hadn’t formally accepted CNEOS 2014-01-08 as an interstellar object, until recently.
Okay, so what exactly changed now? The chief scientist of Space Operations Command from the US Space Command Centre named Dr. Joel Mozer analysed the available data and concluded that the meteorite is indeed an interstellar object as proven by its trajectory. Earlier, the US Department of Defence Satellite denied (they deemed it as ‘classified information’) to reveal this data that could have helped analyse the meteorite’s impact on Earth long before.
Nonetheless, this brand-new development has now led to the launch of an undersea mission, that is likely to shed more light on it. As of now, it is believed that CNEOS 2014-01-08 is a little larger than a microwave and has magnetic fragments lying in the ocean’s floor.
Oumuamua & Borisov: The successors of CNEOS 2014-01-08
Oumuamua passed through the solar system on 9th September 2017 and was discovered 40 days later by astronomer Robert Weryk using the Pan-STARRS telescope stationed at Haleakala Observatory in Hawaii. It was 100 to 1000 metres long, red in colour, and was 33 million kilometres away from the Earth when it was first detected. This meteorite was originally named as 1I/2017 U1, but later was renamed as Oumuamua, the Hawaiian term for ‘scout.’
Borisov was the second discovered interstellar object, originally known as C/2019 Q4. This comet was discovered by an amateur Crimean astronomer and telescope maker Gennadiy Borisov in August 2019 and was later named after its discoverer. It was reported to be 0.4 to 1 kilometre in length.