According to a recently disclosed US Space Command document, researchers identified the first known interstellar meteor. An interstellar meteor is a rare space rock that comes from outside our solar system.
CNEOS 2014-01-08 crashed on the northeastern coast of Papua New Guinea on January 8, 2014.
The finding came as a surprise to Amir Siraj, who identified the object as an interstellar meteor in a 2019 study he coauthored while an undergraduate at Harvard University.
Siraj was researching Oumuamua, the first known interstellar object in our solar system, with Harvard professor Abraham Loeb.
It didn’t take Siraj long to find an interstellar meteor by searching NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies database.
