Researchers believe they have identified a meteorite from another solar system. They plan to recover it with magnets.
Will we soon be able to study an interstellar meteorite? That’s the hope of a team of scientists trying to fish out a stellar object from another solar system that would have run aground in the Pacific a few years ago.
CNEOS meteorite 2014-01-08
Given the number of celestial objects populating our solar system, it is impossible to give them all an elegant and poetic name. On January 8, 2014, a meteorite said to have crashed into the Pacific Ocean 160 kilometers off the coast of Papua New Guinea is said to inherit the barbaric name CNEOS 2014-01-08.
If the latter interests scientists, it’s because they think it comes from somewhere else. In other words, from another solar system! The team enthusiastically states in their study:
“In 2022, the US Department of Defense confirmed that ‘the velocity estimate reported to NASA is sufficiently accurate to indicate an interstellar trajectory,’ which made the issue the first detected interstellar object and the first detected interstellar meteor.”
The Oumuamua interstellar body (believed by some to be of extraterrestrial origin) discovered in 2017 holds that prestigious title until now.
When NASA pointed their Spitzer telescope at Oumuamua, they couldn’t even see it
Oumuamua is very strange indeed. https://t.co/qN0NwXcbdYpic.twitter.com/g4R0mkkzrc
— Ted Corcoran (RedTRaccoon) (@RedTRaccoon) November 16, 2018
A magnet the size of a king-size bed
Now that the fragments of the meteorite have been found, scientists want to do whatever they can to recover them. “Another way to study an interstellar object up close is to launch a space mission to a future object passing around Earth,” says Amir Siraj, the study’s lead author.
Especially after his statement the fragments of CNEOS 2014-01-08, contain large amounts of iron, which could allow them to be recovered with a large magnet. So, via the Galileo project (a major project aimed at studying the signs of extraterrestrial civilizations), Amir Siraj hopes to install a magnet “the size of a king-size bed” and get it criss-crossing the money-sailors. at the spot where the meteorite was spat.
The estimated quantity of this shipment? $1.6 million. It may seem huge, but that amount is nothing compared to the astronomical cost of a space mission!