Secret Government Info Confirms First Known Interstellar Object On Earth, Scientists Say (vice.com) 53
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: An object from another star system crashed into Earth in 2014, the United States Space Command (USSC) confirmed in a newly-released memo. The meteor ignited in a fireball in the skies near Papua New Guinea, the memo states, and scientists believe it possibly sprinkled interstellar debris into the South Pacific Ocean. The confirmation backs up the breakthrough discovery of the first interstellar meteor -- and, retroactively, the first known interstellar object of any kind to reach our solar system -- which was initially flagged by a pair of Harvard University researchers in a study posted on the preprint server arXiv in 2019.
Amir Siraj, a student pursuing astrophysics at Harvard who led the research, said the study has been awaiting peer review and publication for years, but has been hamstrung by the odd circumstances that arose from the sheer novelty of the find and roadblocks put up by the involvement of information classified by the U.S. government. The discovery of the meteor, which measured just a few feet wide, follows recent detections of two other interstellar objects in our solar system, known as 'Oumuamua and Comet Borisov, that were much larger and did not come into close contact with Earth.
"I get a kick out of just thinking about the fact that we have interstellar material that was delivered to Earth, and we know where it is," said Siraj, who is Director of Interstellar Object Studies at Harvard's Galileo Project, in a call. "One thing that I'm going to be checking -- and I'm already talking to people about -- is whether it is possible to search the ocean floor off the coast of Papua New Guinea and see if we can get any fragments." Siraj acknowledged that the odds of such a find are low, because any remnants of the exploded fireball probably landed in tiny amounts across a disparate region of the ocean, making it tricky to track them down. "It would be a big undertaking, but we're going to look at it in extreme depth because the possibility of getting the first piece of interstellar material is exciting enough to check this very thoroughly and talk to all the world experts on ocean expeditions to recover meteorites," he noted. "Siraj called the multi-year process a 'whole saga' as they navigated a bureaucratic labyrinth that wound its way though Los Alamos National Laboratory, NASA, and other governmental arms, before ultimately landing at the desk of Joel Mozer, Chief Scientist of Space Operations Command at the U.S. Space Force service component of USSC," adds Motherboard.
Mozer confirmed that the object indicated "an interstellar trajectory," which was first brought to Siraj's attention last week via a tweet from a NASA scientist. He's now "renewing the effort to get the original discovery published so that the scientific community can follow-up with more targeted research into the implications of the find," the report says.
Amir Siraj, a student pursuing astrophysics at Harvard who led the research, said the study has been awaiting peer review and publication for years, but has been hamstrung by the odd circumstances that arose from the sheer novelty of the find and roadblocks put up by the involvement of information classified by the U.S. government. The discovery of the meteor, which measured just a few feet wide, follows recent detections of two other interstellar objects in our solar system, known as 'Oumuamua and Comet Borisov, that were much larger and did not come into close contact with Earth.
"I get a kick out of just thinking about the fact that we have interstellar material that was delivered to Earth, and we know where it is," said Siraj, who is Director of Interstellar Object Studies at Harvard's Galileo Project, in a call. "One thing that I'm going to be checking -- and I'm already talking to people about -- is whether it is possible to search the ocean floor off the coast of Papua New Guinea and see if we can get any fragments." Siraj acknowledged that the odds of such a find are low, because any remnants of the exploded fireball probably landed in tiny amounts across a disparate region of the ocean, making it tricky to track them down. "It would be a big undertaking, but we're going to look at it in extreme depth because the possibility of getting the first piece of interstellar material is exciting enough to check this very thoroughly and talk to all the world experts on ocean expeditions to recover meteorites," he noted. "Siraj called the multi-year process a 'whole saga' as they navigated a bureaucratic labyrinth that wound its way though Los Alamos National Laboratory, NASA, and other governmental arms, before ultimately landing at the desk of Joel Mozer, Chief Scientist of Space Operations Command at the U.S. Space Force service component of USSC," adds Motherboard.
Mozer confirmed that the object indicated "an interstellar trajectory," which was first brought to Siraj's attention last week via a tweet from a NASA scientist. He's now "renewing the effort to get the original discovery published so that the scientific community can follow-up with more targeted research into the implications of the find," the report says.
Definitely not the first known interstellar object (Score:2)
Re:Definitely not the first known interstellar obj (Score:5, Funny)
Also, all the heavier elements on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system cannot have orginated within the solar system as our sun doesn't produce that kind of heavy elements.
So we all are made of interstellar material.
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and not supernovae, still interstellar though.
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Even modestly massive stars like our own can produce carbon and nitrogen [wikipedia.org] in their later years. It's a late stage in their evolution, when their cores are mostly helium and only held up by degeneracy pressure. You can then ignite carbon production via the triple-alpha process [wikipedia.org]. Some of that material later gets cast off via planetary nebulae, although most will remain behind in the resulting white dwarf.
I'll grant you that a supernova is a much better
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"Produce", yes. "Release", no.
You have to get considerably bigger than the Sun to get significant outflows from the old age star. Probably a fraction of the largest 1% of stars (the Sun is about the 2-3% level in the mass function). But small stars like the Sun don't have the power to lose a significant amount of their mass to the interstellar medium (typically forming, temporarily, a planetary nebula [wikipedia.org], with very v
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Also, all the heavier elements on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system cannot have orginated within the solar system as our sun doesn't produce that kind of heavy elements.
The sun didn't actually make any of the elements in the rocks that make up the planets in the solar system, they condensed from galactic dust.
Maybe a few solar flares have added to the planets since they were formed but it would only be a tiny percentage of the total material.
we all are made of interstellar material.
This. We're all aliens.
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Why was it secret? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Why was it secret? (Score:2)
Was thinking the same thing. But the size isn't an issue because it was far larger than space debris we know Space Command can track. Also, why would LANL be involved? Really sounds more like some BS conspiracy crap.
Also, how would they confirm it's interstellar? Rocks bouncing around and gravity can account for any trajectory I'd think.
Re: Why was it secret? (Score:5, Informative)
Also, how would they confirm it's interstellar?
They aren't certain. But it came in on a high-speed hyperbolic trajectory outside the solar system's orbital plane, so it is highly likely to be interstellar.
Re: Why was it secret? (Score:4, Interesting)
You can get to moderately hyperbolic orbits (eccentricity in the range 1+ to about 1.2, IIRC) from Solar system objects that have had a recent interaction with a larger body (Jupiter, Saturn). So an important point in the prompt identification of 1I/Oumuamua as being interstellar was that it was coming in from nearly perpendicular to the "plane" of the Solar system, so could not have had such an interaction.
Any object that you're going to see again (which makes up the overwhelming majority of observations) cannot have a hyperbolic orbit. (Or, strictly, a parabolic one.)
A complicating factor is that when you have a short arc of observations, you also have significant observational and computational uncertainty in the calculated orbital elements. So a significant number of discoveries yield initial hyperbolic orbits, which additional observations refine back to being parabolic or elliptical. That's part of the reason that the MPC generally doesn't give permanent designations to bodies until they've been detected over more than one opposition [wikipedia.org] (1-2 years, depending on exactly how the body's orbit relates to the Earth's orbit).
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Why did the US Gov't have it classified?
That was my initial reaction - but after a little thought, I'm betting it has to do with the specific technology involved in tracking it, rather than anything to do with the object itself.
Re:Why was it secret? (Score:5, Informative)
It isn't. The only thing that is classified is data from the US nuke detection system, which provided the data that confirmed the origin of the object.
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However, because the military doesn't want folks (think North Korea) to know how sensitive or precise those capabilities are, the CNEOS database contains data that has been intentionally made le
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Why did the US Gov't have it classified?
All data from military installations is classified by default.
There's no "coverup", there's no decisions being made by anybody, it's the default action.
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But in practice, you just assume that every US diplomatic building (Embassies, Consulates, anything else) has one or more type of these monitoring stations on the roof. They're not high tech, or resource intensive. I could probably
"Conspiracy Theories" (Score:1)
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That's what government suppression of these types of events have been called - but this essentially confirms the "conspiracy theories" have been correct all along.
Yep. Every last one of them is now confirmed because of this.
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Especially the one which claims they have atoms in outer space too!
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"I knew it! Insane theories 1, regular theories 1,000,000,000!"
Re:"Conspiracy Theories" (Score:5, Informative)
False. The only thing that was classified is the trajectory data, which was recorded by a system used to track ballistic missiles. Surely you can see why the DOD would want to classify that data: revealing it reveals what the capabilities and limits of that tracking system are, which is information with military value.
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the capabilities and limits of that tracking system ... is information with military value.
Usually because it's embarrassingly bad, not because it's super-advanced tech.
Re: "Conspiracy Theories" (Score:2)
The meteor was detected on a DOD system, of course it's going to be classified
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Yep, scientists all across America are getting rich on their research. That's why they continue to work in universities and gov. organizations because they pay SO much better than private industry and these researchers are getting HUGE payouts from their discoveries. Clearly scams abound. Just the other day I ran into a group of researchers burning $100 bills just to show how well they are doing.
Re: Are there non-scammer scientists left? (Score:2)
You are with taxes
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Who is paying for this scam?
More relevantly, are there any non conspiracy theorist political commenters left?
No need (Score:3)
The fact that several were detected in our solar system and one landed in the South Pacific means that these events are common. There's no need to search the depths of the South Pacific, as there will likely be fragments from another such incident anywhere where meteorite fragments are commonly found, such as embedded in glaciers.
Non-terrestrial mineralogy can be found all over the Earth. Does that make it also terrestrial?
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No, it only means several were detected in our solar system and one landed in the S. Pacific, no more.
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Non-terrestrial mineralogy can be found all over the Earth. Does that make it also terrestrial?
Yes, because it's 100% natural for it to be there.
All the rocks in the Earth originally came from some distant supernova. If you want some "interstellar material" to examine you can just go outside with a shovel and get some. No need to go to the bottom of the ocean.
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Non-terrestrial mineralogy can be found all over the Earth. Does that make it also terrestrial?
Yes, because it's 100% natural for it to be there.
No, because words have meaning, if properly used.
Terrestrial means it formed on the Earth from the original material that formed the Earth.
As I recall, the common claim here on /. is that since humans are products of nature, everything we do is natural too, so everything everywhere is natural and the "word" natural means nothing at all. Using the word "natural" as a leveling bulldozer to erase all distinctions is stupid and/or ignorant, no matter how smart and informed it makes you feel.
Re:No need (Score:4, Informative)
Non-terrestrial mineralogy can be found all over the Earth. Does that make it also terrestrial?
No it doesn't. Terrestrial minerals would ones that are part of the Earth during its formation process, or derived from that material.
Minerals that formed in other parts of the Solar System then fell to Earth are inter-planetary.
Minerals that formed in other star systems then fell to Earth are inter-stellar.
Minerals that formed in other galaxies then fell to Earth are inter-galactic.
This is not difficult to grasp.
The problem with "finding non-terrestrial mineralogy all over the Earth" is recognizing that that is what it is, which is what "finding" means. About the only way that can be done is to analyze the isotope ratios and look for ones that deviate from any known pattern with the Earth, or the Solar System, and then hypothesizing that the variant ratio is due to inter-planetary, or inter-stellar origin. No one has yet ever found a mineral thought to be of extra-solar origin yet, so it is really "non finding them all over the Earth". The mere fact that they are there, and believing that they are there, is not "finding" them. Knowing that an object arrived from outside the Solar System by seeing how it got here would be an enormous advantage.
"Classified Trajectory Info" (Score:2)
Would have been better for the headline, but of course that's not nearly as click baity...
At 130000mph (Score:2)
I don't think there would be anything left over
South Pacific Ocean (Score:2)
So, R'leyh.
I, for one, welcome our Great Old One overlord.
Ah. (Score:2)
So we have a mysterious scientific object that we need to intensively scrutinize a section of seafloor to find 'for scientific purposes'?
Anyone know if a top secret Russian or Chinese sub sank around there recently?
I guess we'll find out if the US government suddenly finds itself motivated to build a massive "science vessel" for the search with surprisingly little prompting.