Move over 'Omuamua

[Linguofreak]

I think the title of the paper speaks for itself:

The 2019 Discovery of a Meteor of Interstellar Origin

The earliest confirmed interstellar object, `Oumuamua, was discovered in the Solar System by Pan-STARRS in 2017, allowing for a calibration of the abundance of interstellar objects of its size $\sim 100\;$ m. This was followed by the discovery of Borisov, which allowed for a similar calibration...

arxiv.org

!!!

 

[Linguofreak]

A clarification on this paper:

It was published to Arxiv in 2019, but was not publicly announced because the event had been detected by military sensors and the researchers only had access to the data that was entered into the database they had been combing through. Confirming the margins of error on the original detection was complicated by the needed data being classified (presumably because the US DoD doesn't want the exact capabilities of its sattelites to be publicly known).

That situation was remedied on the 6th of this month, which is why it's just now hitting the news:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1511856370756177921

Secret Government Info Confirms First Known Interstellar Object on Earth, Scientists Say

A small meteor that hit Earth in 2014 was from another star system, and may have left interstellar debris on the seafloor.

www.vice.com