The US Space Force has confirmed that an interstellar object has crashed into the ocean  

Is its origin natural or artificial?

By studying the data of an object that fell into the ocean off Papua New Guinea, scientists realized that it was not just a meteorite but an interstellar object. Analyzing its orbit, they found that it has an unusually high heliocentric velocity, i.e. it was moving at a speed that cannot come from the Sun’s gravity. So they came to the conclusion that it came from outside the solar system.

The catch is that the information about the collision with Earth came from a US spy satellite and so the exact numbers are a well-guarded US secret so as not to reveal the satellite’s true capabilities. Thus, without this information, the scientific community was hesitant to categorize the object as interstellar. The confirmation came from Joel Mozer, chief scientist of the US Space Force Space Operations Command, who studied the classified data and confirmed the speed to NASA.

Although the status of the object CNEOS 2014-01-08 remains meteoric for now, the two scientists who spotted it suggest recovering the object by searching the ocean. Most of the object would apparently break up in the atmosphere, leaving only small pieces that would scatter on the ocean floor. With current satellite and current data, the search area is limited to an area of ​​10 square kilometers.

There is hope that the pieces are probably magnetic, so a submarine with a magnet might be able to pick them up from the bottom.

The search seems to be undertaken by the Galileo Project , whose head does not exclude the fact that the pieces may be artificial and created by some extraterrestrial intelligence.

The result does not imply that the first interstellar meteorite was produced by a technological civilization and has no natural origin. However, it does not hurt to find the object and establish this.

In any case, even if it is natural, the piece of rock will tell us a lot about the composition of rocky matter beyond the boundaries of our solar system. Something which in itself is of inestimable value to science.