It is an “extraterrestrial intruder” that must be studied by scientists: a meteor that crashed into the Pacific Ocean in 2014 would be pulled out, in part, with a huge magnet. At least, this is what a team from the Harvard University.
interstellar rock called CNEOS 2014-01-08, About 0.5 meters wide, it fell on our planet on January 8, 2014 with an energy equivalent to about 121 tons of TNT.
The United States Space Command confirmed that it was interstellar, and the reason is that it was traveling at 60 kilometers per second in relation to the Sun. It is too fast for it to be handled by the gravity of the sun.
Amir Sirajan astrophysicist at Harvard University, spoke with Words Side Kick, in a note cited by Live Science, to announce the team’s plan.
“Finding such a fragment would represent the first contact that humanity has had with a material larger than dust, from beyond the Solar System,” stressed the expert, who wrote an article about the meteorite.
The reasons why the object that fell over the Pacific is considered interstellar
Siraj identified the object’s interstellar origin in a 2019 study with 99.999% confidence, but it wasn’t until May 2022 that the US Space Command confirmed it.
“It hit the atmosphere about 100 miles off the coast of Papua New Guinea in the middle of the night, with about 1% of the energy of the Hiroshima bomb. Siraj explained, comparing it to the atomic bomb dropped on August 9, 1945 by the United States on Japan.
The scientist explains the reasons why CNEOS 2014-01-08 comes from another star system.
“At the distance from the Earth to the Sun, Any object traveling faster than about 42 kilometers per second is on an unlimited hyperbolic escape path relative to the Sun. Siraj points out.
“This means that CNEOS 2014-01-08 was clearly exceeding the local speed limit for bound objects and did not cross paths with another planet along the way, so it must have originated outside the Solar System.”
How will they be able to get material from the meteorite out of the sea?
The Galileo Project is the name of the mission to extract material from the Pacific meteorite. A ship will carry a magnetic sled on a longline winch, a kind of magnet, which will be towed along the seabed at 1.7 kilometers for 10 days.
The magnet will not be able to remove the entire meteorite, but it will be able to remove small fragments that will be studied.
However, the main problem is the amount of the issue. They need 1.1 million dollars to complete the 1.6 million total. Therefore, there is still no specific date to achieve its goal.