An unexpected visitor that hit Earth in 2014, astronomers have finally confirmed the origin: the asteroid CNEOS 2014-01-08 is an interstellar visitor from another star system. Knocked on Earth 3 years before the famous interstellar visitor ‘Oumuamua (A/2017 U1).
In 2019, researchers opened the catalog of NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) and found a record of this meteor. However, the track record data was considered classified by the U.S. Department of Defence (DoD). In March, the U.S. Department of Defense issued an open letter affirming the research results of scientists and encouraging research to find its homeland.
CNEOS 2014-01-08 is about 90 cm and is very small. It broke into the earth’s atmosphere on January 8, 2014 and fell to the ground at a high speed of 21.6 kilometers per hour. But the trajectory is so unusual that one can’t help but suspect that it came from outside the solar system. Considering that it was affected by the gravity of various planets when it flew in the solar system, scientists pushed back the route it took to visit the solar system, confirming that CNEOS 2014-01-08 is indeed not a person from the solar system.
The paper, published in the Astrophysical Journal, confirms that CNEOS 2014-01-08 was the first visitor from interstellar. Asteroid ‘Oumuamua (about 200 meters) flew past Earth in 2017. A year later, astronomers discovered another celestial object, the 500-meter-wide interstellar comet 2I/Borisov, originally named C/2019 Q4 (Borisov). A succession of new discoveries has led astronomers to believe that these small interstellar rocks are not only common, but even regularly rendezvous with Earth’s orbit.
This is also the reason why the author of the paper checked the CNEOS database. In addition to CNEOS 2014-01-08, another candidate meteor was found, a space rock cut into the atmosphere in March 2017, but there are still other data to be confirmed.
Researchers believe that interstellar rocks may smash into Earth’s atmosphere in about 10 years, and analyzing these meteor chemistry can also help understand distant star systems. “By investigating the trajectory of each meteor in real time and analyzing the relative abundance of chemical isotopes, it can be used as a bridge to understand the star to which an interstellar asteroid belongs,” the authors said.
Most meteors burn up by friction with the atmosphere before they hit Earth. Obtaining meteor observations is time-consuming and technically challenging. The researchers propose to create a global camera network capable of spectral measurement to analyze the spectra of interstellar meteors when they rub and burn with the atmosphere to obtain chemical elements, calculate trajectories and fall points, and provide information on where meteorites were collected.
In addition, CNEOS 2014-01-08 exploded over the waters near Papua New Guinea. Scientists believe that some debris may enter the atmosphere and fall into the sea. Researchers plan to salvage it next year to try to find meteorite samples. The authors suggest that interstellar visitors visiting Earth so frequently may represent the seeds of life sprouting on Earth over the past 3.5 billion years, possibly from another star system.
(This article is reproduced with permission from the Taipei Planetarium; the first image is a schematic diagram; source: Pixabay)
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