A high-speed fireball that struck Earth in 2014 looked to be interstellar in origin, but verifying this extraordinary claim required extraordinary cooperation from secretive defense programs
On January 8, 2014, at 17:05:34 UT, an approximately meter-sized rock from space streaked through the sky off the coast of Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, burning up with an energy equivalent to about 110 metric tons of TNT and raining debris into the depths of the Pacific Ocean. Similar-sized fireballs are not uncommon occurrences in Earth’s skies; in fact, a few dozen of them occur each year.
At Earth’s distance from the sun, any object moving faster than about 42 kilometers per second is in an unbounded, hyperbolic orbit relative to our star, meaning that it is too speedy to be captured by the sun’s gravity. Anything traveling over this local celestial speed limit, then, may come from interstellar space. The CNEOS entry for the 2014 Manus Island fireball indicated the meteor hit the Earth’s atmosphere at about 45 kilometers per second—very promising.
A year later, however, we were approached by Pete Worden, the chair of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, with an introduction to Matt Daniels, who at the time was working for the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Daniels had read our preprint about the 2014 meteor and wished to help to confirm its origin from within the U.S. government.
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