An interstellar traveler like ‘Oumuamua exploded to Earth in 2014’

As Futura explained in a previous article about 100th birthday of Arthur Clarke strangely coincided with the discovery on October 19, 2017 of an object no doubt on an interstellar orbit, the first ever detected to come from outside our solar system, it seemed at the time, namely 1I/2017 U1. But he is better known as Oumuamua † messenger who came from far and arrived first in Hawaiian) and its amazing features suggested it could be a true interstellar probe of an advanced alien civilization.

The vast majority of the scientific community has long believed that this: hypothesis has been refuted and that’s why she was especially annoyed at the insistence of…Abraham Loeb about it, as evidenced by the review of theastrophysicist Frank Selsis† Chair of the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University (USA) from 2011 to 2020 and deeply involved in the project Breakthrough Starshot — a beam-driven photonic nano-veil laser to the stars closest to the Sunin the system of Alpha Centauri –, Loeb defended the ET thesis for ‘Oumuamua in a book, translated by Charles Frankel and it was published by Editions du Seuil under the title The first sign of extraterrestrial intelligent life†

But before that, as Futura had explained in the previous article below, which we recommend reading before reading this article further, Loeb had filed in 2019 at arXiv a paper with his student and colleague Amir Siraj, also a theoretical astrophysicist at Harvard University and in fact lead author of the 2019 paper.

The two men put forward the claim that the first object of interstellar origin had in fact been discovered on January 8, 2014. It was a small celestial body, about 0.45 meters in size, which is said to have exploded in the sky.atmosphere of Earth just above Papua New Guinea entering the upper layers on a speed around 210,000 km/h.

Interstellar traveler confirmed by US Space Command

However, Siraj and Loeb relied on information from thethe US space command, that is, the United States Space Command (USSC), one of the eleven Joint Combatant Commands of the United States Armed Forces, charged with space operations. As a result, they did not have all the data proving the existence and properties of the object that fell in 2014, so that the uncertainties about its speed and trajectory could not be conclusively established that it was indeed an interstellar visitor.

But after a battle with the military administration using sensors to detect possible explosions of nuclear weapons in the Earth’s atmosphere (this is prohibited by a international treaty), Loeb and Siraj have seen their efforts pay off since the USSC just officially confirmed that its own scientific experts, in fact on the advice of Joel B.Mozerhad come to the same conclusion as the two men and therefore validated their claim.

This confirmation comes in the form of an internal memo dated 1^er March 2022 and shared on Twitter on April 7 by Lieutenant General John E. Shaw, Deputy Commander of the USSC.

The explosion of the small celestial body took place not far from Manus, one of the Admiralty Islands, the fifth largest island in Papua New Guinea. Siraj wonders if oceanic expeditions wouldn’t make it possible to find on the seafloor near the remains of this interstellar body, just as one can find meteorites isolated on dunes of sand in a desert or in Antarctic ice†

An interstellar meteor reportedly fell on Earth in 2014

Article by Xavier Demeersmann published on 21-04-2019

Dozens of meteorites fall to Earth every day. Harvard researchers think they’ve discovered at least one meteor (they spelled three candidates) that would be of interstellar origin, that is, would come from elsewhere, from another planetary system such as ‘Oumuamua.

Featured in the ranking of time magazine of the 25 most influential people in space, Abraham Loeb (or Avi Loeb), the esteemed head of Harvard University’s department of astronomy, made himself known to a wider audience a few months ago with the publication of a highly noted research where he hypothesizes that the now famous ‘Oumuamua’first interstellar object never discovered, is an artifact from elsewhere.

to explain his Brightness so special and his behavior, Shmuel Bialy and him indeed do not exclude the possibility that it is so a probe equipped with a large and thin solar sail† An assumption not shared by all his colleagues and which is controversial. “I can commit professional suicide if I’m wrong”he said to the newspaper. Al Haaretz† It gives me more time to do science. But if I’m right, it’s one of the greatest discoveries in human history.” he continued.

Note that several of his colleagues are just as intrigued as he is: “These high-ranking personalities themselves say that this object has very special properties. But they dare not announce it publicly.†

Believing that 1I/2017 U1 — official name of ‘Oumuamua — is not the only or even the first visitor from elsewhere in our solar system, Avi Loeb and Amir Siraj, a Harvard student, are followed in the footsteps of possible little interstellar travelers who would have ended their journey on Earth. They found three, one with a strong suspicion that it is not native to the solar system.

Billions of billions of interstellar meteorites in the Milky Way

Not very large — about three feet — the object entered Earth’s atmosphere at 5:05 PM UT on January 8, 2014, over the southwestern Pacific Ocean, not far from Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. It is one of the Cneos detectors (Center for Near-Earth Object Research) who has seen it. The two researchers searched thirty years of data collected by the various observatories of this American program.

It was the speed of this invader that made them question. And it was precisely the high-speed meteorites that they looked for in the archives because they probably took advantage of an acceleration within another system. The object was hurtling at a speed of about 216,000 km/h as it entered the atmosphere. In addition, the direction of the room from which he came helps to convince them that he was not from here. For one of the other two candidates they dug up in the catalog, the two astronomers are more skeptical. Although as fast as the first, it is track suggests that it belongs to our solar system.

Three possible interstellar meteors — and possibly more — stranded on Earth (disintegrated in the atmosphere) in 30 years, or one every 10 years on average, which is a lot over billions of years. The two researchers calculated that there would be about a million of these objects volume of 150 million cubic kilometers (a astronomical unit), across the galaxy.

So, is our planet often watered by these small rocks displaced by other stars? This is a possibility that is taken very seriously by astronomers. “You can imagine that if these meteors were ejected from a star’s habitable zone, they could help transfer life from one planetary system to another”, Avi Loeb points out. To learn more about their topics, the author and co-author of more than 700 scientific papers would like to telescopes point to the fastest meteorites as soon as they are detected to infer their composition.