A dishwasher-size meteorite exploded in the fiery atmosphere of Earth before sunrise on the shores of New Zealand. The Harvard researchers said that the space rock was the first observed meteorite from another star system.
They submitted the claim to an astronomy journal. The paper wasn't accepted for publication. Reviewers noted a lack of detail to verify the claim about the fireball in the published data, which came from a NASA database and relied on readings that were obscured because they were from U.S. intelligence community satellites.
One of the researchers, a Harvard undergrad student studying astrophysics, said that they had thought this was a lost cause. He conceded that it was difficult to figure out whether the object was truly interstellar or not without the more thorough data.
The truth was out there. The data from the missile warning satellites that were released by the U.S. Space Command was sufficiently accurate to indicate the path of the meteorite. The three-year effort by Mr. Siraj and a well-known Harvard astronomer culminated in the publication of the memo.
Many scientists, including those at NASA, say that the military still hasn't released enough data to confirm the origin of the space rock, and a spokeswoman said Space Command would defer to other authorities on the question. It wasn't the only information that would be released. NASA received decades of secret military data on the brightness of hundreds of other fireballs.
It is an unusual degree of visibility of a set of data coming from that world, according to Matt Daniels, assistant director for space security at the White House.
In recent years, a pair of objects that passed through our stellar neighborhood drew attention because they were confirmed to have originated outside the solar system. Oumuamua was the first object to go through the solar system. One of the two people who studied the meteorite in the year 2014) has attracted attention and dispute by arguing that Oumuamua was technology sent by intelligent life. Astronomers are debating what kind of object it was.
Borisov, a comet roughly the size of the Eiffel Tower, became the second confirmed visitor in 2019. After it rounded the sun, a piece broke off.
Academic researchers could use the data from military satellites to study objects closer to Earth. They could help NASA protect planet Earth from killer asteroids. A new agreement with the U.S. Space Force aims to help NASA better understand what happens when space rocks reach the atmosphere.
Dr. Daniels at the White House was involved in the effort to get a public statement from Space Command. The Astrophysical Journal Letters is a peer-reviewed scientific publication. The White House official brought up the idea of a meteorite in a conversation with Space Command officials in 2020, which led to the government making a public statement about the satellite's data.
I knew that this would be a challenge, and so it was an ongoing conversation for some time.
Sharing sensitive military satellite data has led to scientific discoveries in the past.
In the 1960s, a group of satellites deployed by the United States to detect covert detonations of nuclear weapons on Earth accidentally became the key instruments used to detect extraterrestrial gamma ray bursts. Analysts at Los Alamos National Lab were confused by the bursts on the satellites, which they classified as single bursts of energy.
Mr. Siraj and Dr. Loeb still disagree about the hypothesis of the interstellar meteorite.
Many people have interpreted Space Command's statement to NASA as confirmation that the meteorite is not in the solar system. They say that there are no error bars that show how precise or uncertain the measurement was.
The sentence isn't enough. Maria Hajdukova, a researcher at the Astronomical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Slovakia, said that scientific results are published.
The short duration of collected data makes it difficult to determine if the object is real.
NASA's planetary defense officer, Lindley Johnson, said in an interview that they can't confirm that it is.
Dr. Loeb said that five seconds is plenty of time. You can do a lot in five seconds.
He and Mr. Siraj plan to submit their paper again. The data from the military agency may help their argument, said Peter Veres, an astronomer at the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center, which tracks objects in the solar system.
It looks weird, I can tell you that, according to Dr. Veres.
The Space Command letter was provocative enough to be noted by NASA officials who shared it throughout the agency. The director of NASA's planetary science division said in an email to colleagues that they believe the potential of this event being an especially high-velocity entry of a very small body into Earth's atmosphere.
The congressional mandate to detect nearly all asteroids that could threaten the earth is one of the main reasons for Space Force's increasing ties with NASA. NASA signed an agreement with the Space Force in 2020 to strengthen their relationship, but acknowledged that it had fallen behind in its asteroid- tracking efforts and would need Pentagon resources to carry out its planetary defense mission.
The recent bolide agreement granting NASA access to light curve data that will help scientists analyze the physical properties of plunging fireballs is one step in that direction.
The data set has been released by the U.S. Space Command and the U.S. Space Force.
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