First known interstellar meteor hit Earth in 2014

U.S. officials confirmed a space rock that streaked through the skies off the coast of PNG in January 2014 was, in fact, an incredibly rare meteor.

This meteor is known as CNEOS 2014-01-08. It crash-landed on Jan. 8, 2014, but not until last week did government officials confirm the origin of this space rock.

The meteor was determined as “interstellar” by Amir Siraj in 2019. At the time, Siraj, a student at Harvard University, worked to determine his findings with his academic adviser, Abraham Loeb, a professor of science at the university. Officials used Siraj and Loeb’s findings as well as additional information pulled from the U.S. Department of Defence to make this confirmation official.

The 2014 meteor is now one of three such interstellar meteors that have been confirmed to date, alongside Oumuamua and the interstellar comet Borisov, Siraj wrote in Scientific American.

Siraj said he hopes more follow up research into such interstellar meteors can be done to learn even more about them.