Massive magnet plans for deep-sea meteorite fishing
Astronomers are planning a fishing trip to land an extraterrestrial interloper on Earth: a small meteorite from another star system that crashed into the Pacific Ocean with energy equivalent to about 110 tonnes of TNT. The team, from Harvard University, hopes to find fragments of this interstellar rock, known as CNEOS 2014-01-08, which slammed into Earth on 8 January 2014.
“Finding such a fragment would represent the first contact humanity has ever had with material larger than dust from beyond the Solar System,” said Amir Siraj, an astrophysicist at Harvard University. Siraj identified the object’s interstellar origin in 2019 with 99.999 per cent confidence, but it wasn’t until May 2022 that it was confirmed to Siraj by the US Space Command. “It struck the atmosphere about a hundred miles off the coast of Papua New Guinea in the middle of the night with about one per cent the energy of the Hiroshima bomb,” Siraj said.
Measuring just 0.5 metres wide, CNEOS 2014-01-08 now appears to have been the first interstellar object ever discovered in our Solar System. CNEOS 2014-01-08 is thought to be from another star system because it was travelling at 37.2 miles per second relative to the Sun. That’s too fast for it to be bound by the Sun’s gravity. “At Earth’s distance from the Sun, any object travelling faster than about 42 kilometres per second [26 miles per second] is on an unbounded, hyperbolic escape trajectory relative to the Sun,” Siraj said. “This means that CNEOS 2014-01-08 was clearly exceeding the local
speed limit for bound objects. It didn’t cross paths with any other planets along the way, so it must have originated from outside of the Solar System.”
Now Siraj and Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb are working on an expedition called the Galileo Project to lower a magnet similar in dimensions to a king size bed at 1.3 degrees south, 147.6 degrees east – the US Department of Defense’s location of the meteorite’s resting spot. That’s about 186 miles north of Manus Island in the Bismarck Sea in the southwest Pacific Ocean.
CNEOS 2014-01-08 greatly exceeded the material strength of a typical iron meteorite, which should make it even easier to recover. Material strength refers to how easily something can resist being deformed or damaged by a load. “Most meteorites contain enough iron that they will stick to the type of magnet we plan on using for the ocean expedition,” Siraj said. “Given its extremely high material strength, it’s very likely that the fragments of CNEOS 2014-01-08 are ferromagnetic.” Leaving from Papua New Guinea, the Galileo Project’s ship would use a magnetic sled on a longline winch which will be towed along the seabed for one mile over ten days. It’s hoped the magnet can recover tiny fragments of the meteorite, measuring as small as 0.1 millimetres across. However, it’s unclear when the astronomers will be able to mount their expedition.
“The alternative way to study an interstellar object at close range is by launching a space mission to a future object passing through Earth’s neighbourhood,” said Siraj, who with Loeb is also working out the details of such a mission should another interstellar object like ‘Oumuamua appear in the Solar System.