CNEOS 2014-01-08

CNEOS 2014-01-08 is an interstellar object reported in June 2019 by astronomers Amir Siraj and Abraham Loeb, and confirmed by the U.S. Space Command in April 2022.[1][2][3][4] The discovery was published as a non-peer reviewed paper in arXiv announcing a 0.45 m (1.5 ft) meteor detected on 8 January 2014 near the northeast coast of Papua New Guinea.[5] According to the researchers, the meteor originated from an unbound hyperbolic orbit with a confidence of 99.999%.[6] The interstellar candidate was found in data from the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies.[7] The estimated speed of the meteor, around 60 km/s (37 mi/s), was likely produced in the innermost cores of another stellar system.[8] A 2019 study by Jorge I. Zuluaga published as a research note by the American Astronomical Society concluded that even if the direction were completely unknown, the probability that CNEOS 2014-01-08 was hyperbolic would still be 48%.[9]

Example of a typical meteor in the night sky

Confirmation was originally stymied by the problem that crucial information quantifying the accuracy of the U.S. government's data is not publicly available. However, in 2022, the United States Space Command divulged that data on the meteor's velocity is "sufficiently accurate to indicate an interstellar trajectory".[10][3] Since then, Amir Siraj, one of the astronomers who reported the finding of the purported interstellar meteorite, noted "We are currently investigating whether a mission to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Manus Island, in the hopes of finding fragments of the 2014 meteor, could be fruitful or even possible."[3]