Scientists to Scan Ocean Ground for Meteorite That Crashed on Earth in 2014

A mysterious object from house crashed into the ocean off the coast of Papua New Guinea in 2014. Called the CNEOS 2014-01-08, the meteorite has nonetheless held researchers puzzled about its origin but originally, it was speculated that it could be an interstellar object. Right after its discovery, scientists specifically then graduate Amir Siraj, and Harvard professor Avi Loeb to start with suspected its attainable interstellar origin. Now, they are chalking up plans to scan the ocean floor for the object and have explained their notion in a new research paper.

The object is believed to be some half-metre wide and researchers have utilized catalog facts on the object’s trajectory to dig out information on it. They observed the large heliocentric velocity of the object and concluded that it could belong to a location further than our solar system. This intended that with such velocity, it was indicative that the meteorite was not certain by the gravity of the Sunlight. Siraj and Loeb employed data from a US Department of Protection spy satellite to measure the object’s impression on Earth.

Nonetheless, the satellite is utilised for monitoring Earthly military things to do and the actual mistake values of measurement taken by it are not in the community domain. That’s why, this tends to make it difficult to confidently declare CNEOS 2014-01-08 as an interstellar item.

The findings of Siraj and Loeb had been echoed by the US Area Force’s Area Functions Command’s Main Scientist, Joel Mozer in 2019. He, immediately after analysing the info on the object “confirmed that the velocity estimate described to NASA is sufficiently exact to show an interstellar trajectory.”

6/ “I had the pleasure of signing a memo with @ussfspoc‘s Chief Scientist, Dr. Mozer, to validate that a beforehand-detected interstellar item was in truth an interstellar object, a confirmation that assisted the broader astronomical neighborhood.” pic.twitter.com/PGlIOnCSrW

— U.S. Place Command (@US_SpaceCom) April 7, 2022

Now, researchers have aimed at hunting for the fragments of the meteorite that could be scattered on the ocean flooring. For this, the monitoring information from the satellite and wind and ocean existing knowledge can help narrow down their research.