An interstellar meteor may have hit the Earth and the implications are fascinating

A new study by two Harvard researchers reveals that the cosmos may have already deposited with us the first visitor as far away as it was five years ago, in 2014, when a small meteor was observed. is crushed on Earth, near Papua New Guinea, in the South Pacific. According to their research, this object 1.5 feet wide probably comes from another solar system.

"Almost all the objects that hit Earth come from the solar system," says Dr. Abraham Loeb, director of the astronomy department at Harvard University and co-author of the study. "They are made with the same materials as the solar system.The interstellar ones come from another source.It's a bit like receiving a message in a bottle from a remote place.We can actually look at it as if we were walking on the beach and watching the shells being swept to the ground, we could learn something about the ocean. "

A time capsule

Loeb and his co-author Amir Siraj have studied the velocity of objects entering the earth's atmosphere, which can be used to predict whether the object was moving relative to the orbit of our sun.

"What we did, it's take the meteor's properties, the speed at the moment of impact and extrapolate whether it was sun-related or not," Loeb said. Of the three fastest objects ever recorded, the fastest was clearly related to our sun. The third fastest could not be clearly ranked. But the second fastest, says Loeb, had all the characteristics of being literally out of this solar system.

"At this speed, it takes tens of thousands of years for an object to go from one star to the other," he says. Since they do not know exactly where it comes from, they can not say exactly how old it is, but it could be downright old. "To cross the galaxy, it would take hundreds of millions of years."

A sign of potential life

Of all the possibilities offered by this relatively small object, the most interesting is perhaps the idea that in theory, interstellar objects could carry the life of other solar systems.

"More importantly, life may be transferred between the stars," says Loeb. "In principle, life could survive in the heart of a rock, either bacteria or tardigrades (a microscopic animal, living in water), they can survive under harsh conditions in the water. space and get to us. "

Breathtaking? Only a little. And although the item detailed in this article is the first interstellar meteor recorded to touch Earth, the study estimates that such objects enter the Earth's atmosphere every ten years or so, this which means that there could be a million different interstellar objects floating around our solar system. to be examined.