Interstellar meteor struck in 2014 - scientists want to search for it at ocean bottom

[C C]

https://www.universetoday.com/157009/an-...the-ocean/

EXCERPTS: Back in 2014, an object crashed into the ocean just off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Data collected at the time indicated that the meteorite just might be an interstellar object, and if that’s true, then it’s only the third such object known (after Oumuamua and Borisov), and the first known to exist on Earth. Launching an undersea expedition to find it would be a long shot, but the scientific payoff could be enormous. [...] “This result does not imply that the first interstellar meteor was artificially made by a technological civilization and not natural in origin,” Avi Loeb and Amir Siraj write in their most recent paper outlining the ocean expedition. But it’s clear that Loeb thinks it wouldn’t hurt to go find the object and take a look... (MORE - missing details)

Did Aliens Just Crash Into the Pacific? - Dr. Avi Loeb, Harvard Astrophysics ... https://youtu.be/m7h46sP1Euk

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/bEb6oZAACB8

[Zinjanthropos]

https://www.universetoday.com/157009/an-...the-ocean/

EXCERPTS: Back in 2014, an object crashed into the ocean just off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Data collected at the time indicated that the meteorite just might be an interstellar object, and if that’s true, then it’s only the third such object known (after Oumuamua and Borisov), and the first known to exist on Earth. Launching an undersea expedition to find it would be a long shot, but the scientific payoff could be enormous. [...] “This result does not imply that the first interstellar meteor was artificially made by a technological civilization and not natural in origin,” Avi Loeb and Amir Siraj write in their most recent paper outlining the ocean expedition. But it’s clear that Loeb thinks it wouldn’t hurt to go find the object and take a look... (MORE - missing details)

Maybe I missed it, read it twice, but at what depth is the ocean there?

[C C]

Maybe I missed it, read it twice, but at what depth is the ocean there?

Nothing clear about the level where CNEOS 2014-01-08 fell. There are ore deposits off the coast of New Guinea that are 1600 meters deep, but the Bismark Sea ranges from 2000 to 2,500 meters deep. EDIT: That's where Manus Island is.

[Zinjanthropos]

Maybe I missed it, read it twice, but at what depth is the ocean there?

Nothing clear about the level where CNEOS 2014-01-08 fell. There are ore deposits off the coast of New Guinea that are 1600 meters deep, but the Bismark Sea overall ranges from 2000 to 2,500 meters.

Thanks. Article mentions word trajectory but that’s it. Was it straight in or a skipping stone?

[C C]

Thanks. Article mentions word trajectory but that’s it. Was it straight in or a skipping stone?

Despite being described as a fireball, no images or video footage of it seems readily available. Hyperbolic trajectory and "hitting Earth from behind" doesn't clarify the contingent circumstances of the immediate strike.  

Panspermia via sources outside this solar system could get a boost.

https://www.9news.com.au/world/us-milita...b033908b6f

EXCERPT: The heliocentric speed is defined as the meteor's speed relative to the sun, which is a more accurate way to determine an object's orbit. It's calculated based on the angle at which a meteor hits the Earth.

The planet moves in one direction around the sun, so the meteor could have hit Earth head-on, meaning opposite the direction the planet is moving, or from behind, in the same direction the Earth is moving.

Since the meteor hit the Earth from behind, Mr Siraj's calculations said the meteor was actually travelling at about 60km per second relative to the sun.

He then mapped out the trajectory of the meteor and found it was in an unbound orbit, unlike the closed orbit of other meteors. This means that rather than circling around the sun like other meteors, it came from outside the solar system.

"Presumably, it was produced by another star, got kicked out of that star's planetary system and just so happened to make its way to our solar system and collide with Earth," Mr Siraj said.

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https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...ar-system/

EXCERPT: “Either it came from a star in the galaxy’s thick disk [a small and diffuse subset of speedy stars that surround the thin disk like a halo],” he says, “or it came from the galaxy’s thin disk, from inner regions of a planetary system where objects orbit at higher speeds.”

The pair’s analysis also suggests interstellar objects of this scale strike the Earth at least once per decade—meaning perhaps almost half a billion have rained down upon our planet throughout its 4.5-billion-year history. Stars near our own should eject anywhere between 0.2 and 20 Earth masses of such objects over the course of their lives, Loeb and Siraj estimate—and at any time, on the order of a million should be somewhere within the Earth's orbit around the sun.

Such possibilities carry profound implications. “Some of these objects could potentially transfer life between planetary systems,” Loeb says, referring to a broad theory known as panspermia (ancient Greek for “all seeds”) that posits life first began in outer space and can readily migrate between planets.

[...] “If a tenth or a twentieth of a percent of the population was hyperbolic as Loeb and Siraj claim, you’d expect to have a fair number of hyperbolics in the data from ground-based networks—but we don’t see that.”

Even so, Brown adds, “it is a fantastic thing that others are coming from different disciplines and applying their own approaches to this rich data set…. Interstellar meteorites must be hitting Earth’s atmosphere, and fireballs are the natural way to look for them. We just have to find them convincingly, in ways that can’t be dismissed as measurement uncertainties.”

[Zinjanthropos]

Whatever tech they use to find it should be made available for those looking for Flight 370. Would they use same techniques police do with respect to finding drowning victims, such as water currents in the search area?

Is panspermia dead or should it still be happening? If these objects carry life and with the Earth being pelted by them many times throughout history, then does it stand to reason all life is basically the same with respect to DNA and such? Not like there’s numerous other versions roaming a planet supposedly injected with life from afar. Or would any newly introduced life instantly become prey to more advanced/evolved organisms here?

[C C]

[...] Is panspermia dead or should it still be happening? If these objects carry life and with the Earth being pelted by them many times throughout history, then does it stand to reason all life is basically the same with respect to DNA and such? Not like there’s numerous other versions roaming a planet supposedly injected with life from afar. Or would any newly introduced life instantly become prey to more advanced/evolved organisms here?

Probably the latter. Same applies outside of panspermia, to any new instances of abiogenesis that might have remotely happened on Earth since the very earliest days. Either wiped out immediately by more sophisticated competition, or never progressing beyond a simple, self-replicating molecule stage that is rare (confined to an isolated but safe environmental niche, and accordingly unnoticeable to biologists who aren't looking for something like that).