(ORDO NEWS) — According to a recent memo released by the US Space Command (USSC), the fireball that swept through the skies over Papua New Guinea in 2014 was actually a fast-moving object from another star system.
The object, a small meteorite only 0.45 meters in diameter, crashed into Earth‘s atmosphere on January 8, 2014 after traveling through space at over 210,000 km/h a speed that far exceeds the average speed of meteors orbiting the solar system, according to the object’s study. published in 2019 in the arXiv preprint database .
A 2019 study claimed that the speed of a tiny meteor, as well as the trajectory of its orbit, prove with 99 percent certainty that the object originated far outside our solar system – perhaps “from the bowels of a planetary system or a star in the disk of the Milky Way,” they write. the authors.
But despite the confidence, the team’s paper was never peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal because some of the data needed to verify their calculations was considered classified by the US government.
Now USSC scientists have officially confirmed the group’s findings. In a March 1 memo posted on Twitter on April 6, Lieutenant General John E. Shaw, USSC Deputy Commander, wrote that the 2019 fireball analysis was “accurate enough to confirm an interstellar trajectory.”
This retroactive confirmation makes the 2014 meteor the first interstellar object ever detected in our solar system, the memo says.
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