Scientists have suggested that an interstellar object fell to Earth
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After analyzing data from astronomical catalogs, Avi Loeb and his graduate student Amir Siraj of Harvard University concluded that a meteorite that fell into the sea near New Guinea in 2014 could have come from another star system. As one of the arguments, they point to the fact that the object entered the planet’s atmosphere at a speed of about 45 kilometers per second.
To date, scientists are aware of more than 750 thousand asteroids and comets that originated in the solar system, and only two space objects that are “guests” in the orbit of the Sun. For some time, 1I/Oumuamua, discovered on October 19, 2017, was considered the only interstellar space object. The letter I in this full designation was introduced for the first time and stands for “interstellar” (interstellar). The word “Oumuamua” itself can be roughly translated from the Hawaiian language as “the messenger who arrived first from afar.”
The second space object in history officially recognized as interstellar was discovered by Gennady Borisov on August 30, 2019. Initially, the comet was named C/2019 Q4 (Borisov), but after the scientific community finally recognized it as coming from another star, this name was changed to 2I/Borisov, where 2 is the serial number of the object, I is the designation that it is interstellar , and “Borisov” is the name of the discoverer.
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