An interstellar meteor hit our planet and the US government hid the details
(USCC/DoD - Twitter)
Data from ground tracking stations of the US Space Command confirmed that the body that burned up in the Earth's atmosphere in January 2014 was moving along a hyperbolic trajectory.
Thus, it became the first known interstellar meteor, and the first interstellar object… even before ‘Oumuamua.
The first known interstellar asteroid moving along a hyperbolic trajectory and preparing to leave the solar system was the asteroid 1I/'Oumuamua, discovered in the fall of 2017.
At the end of the summer of 2019, astronomers first discovered a comet that arrived from interstellar space, the 2I/Borisov, which collapsed after approaching the Sun.
In the spring of 2019, Avi Loeb and Amir Siraj of Harvard University announced they had discovered the first interstellar meteor.
It is assumed that the body, with a diameter of about 45 centimeters, burned up in the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean near Papua New Guinea on the evening of January 8, 2014.
At the same time, it moved at a speed of almost 60 kilometers per second, which indicates its interstellar origin.
On March 1, 2022, the US Space Command (USSC) released a memorandum stating that data from ground-based tracking stations maintained by the US Department of Defense confirmed that the interstellar meteor candidate was moving along a hyperbolic trajectory.
However, research will continue as the meteor was visible for less than five seconds.
Despite claims that the meteor found by astronomers is the first interstellar one, this may not be the case.
In 2006, Russian scientists using the SCORPIO spectrograph, observed a dim sporadic meteor moving at a speed of about 300 kilometers per second, which also indicates its interstellar origin.
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