US Military confirms meteorite that hit earth in 2014 was interstellar

Bits of the well-traveled object could now be lying at the bottom of the Pacific.

The mysterious, oblong object Oumuamua is likely to go down in the annals of science as the first known interstellar object to be spotted in our solar system, but it’s now clear that a bit of cosmic rubble that smacked our atmosphere a few years earlier was also from very deep space.

In 2019, two of the Harvard researchers who studied Oumuamua in depth drafted a new paper positing that an extremely speedy meteorite that blazed a trail through the atmosphere in 2014 was also interstellar. The record of its impact and hints at its unusual origin had been hiding in plain sight in a NASA fireball database for years.

“Its high … speed implies a possible origin from the deep interior of a planetary system or a star in the thick disk of the Milky Way galaxy,” reads the summary of the paper from student Amir Siraj and veteran astronomer Avi Loeb.

However, as Siraj recently told Vice, peer review and publication of the paper have been held up because the US military had classified some of the data needed to confirm the scientists’ calculations.

That bureaucratic logjam now appears to be broken.

An unusual memo from US Space Command to NASA’s science head was shared via the USSC Twitter account last week after deputy commander Lt. Gen. John Shaw revealed its existence at the annual Space Symposium in Colorado.