Confirmation is stymied because information quantifying the accuracy of the U.S. government's data is not publicly available. In 2022, theUnited States Space Command divulged that data on themeteor'svelocity is "sufficiently accurate to indicate an interstellar trajectory."[23][5]
Further related studies were reported on 1 September 2023.[24][25]
The Galileo Project intends to recover fragments of CNEOS 2014-01-08 from the seafloor off the coast of Papua New Guinea[26]
Amir Siraj, one of the authors who reported the finding of the purported interstellar meteorite, noted, "We are currently investigating whether a mission to the bottom of thePacific Ocean off the coast ofManus Island in the hopes of finding fragments of the 2014 meteor could be fruitful or even possible."[5][27] Later, in apreprint (as well as in interviews), the authors described a planned expedition byThe Galileo Project to retrieve small fragments of the meteor by deploying a magnetic sled on the seafloor of the impact region using a long-line winch,[28][29][30][31][32] as the object—according to Loeb—"appears to be rare both in composition and in speed", and a possible identity with "extraterrestrial equipment" cannot be ruled out.[33][34] Siraj noted that "[t]he alternative way to study an interstellar object at close range is by launching a space mission to a future object passing through the Earth's neighborhood"—a feat thought to be much more expensive than the project's planned budget of $1.6 million.[31] In the study, the astronomers write:[30][32]
Interestingly, CNEOS 2014-01-08, with a ram pressure of 194 MPa at peak brightness, has the highest material strength of all 273 bolides. The second highest tensile strength is smaller by more than a factor of 2, namely 81 MPa for the 2017-12-15 13:14:37 bolide. The third highest tensile strength, 75 MPa, belongs to the2017-03-09 04:16:37 bolide, which we identified as a possible interstellar meteor candidate (Siraj & Loeb 2019c). Of course, this result does not imply that the first interstellar meteor was artificially made by a technologicalcivilization and not natural in origin (Loeb 2021).Iron meteorites make about a twentieth of allspace rocks arriving on Earth.
In a September 2022 blog post, Loeb announced that the Galileo Project expedition to search for fragments had been fully funded.[35]
In November 2022, a paper was published claiming that the purportedly anomalous properties (such as high tensile strength and strongly hyperbolic trajectory) possessed by CNEOS-2014-01-08 are better described as measurement error, rather than as genuine parameters. If this is correct, successful retrieval of any meteoroid fragments is highly unlikely.[13]
In July 2023, Amir Siraj and Avi Loeb reported finding metallic fragments that they believed to be from CNEOS 2014-01-08, the isotopic ratios of which indicated an age greater than that of theSolar System.[36][37] Other astronomers have doubted that the meteor was interstellar,[14][38] and criticized Siraj's and Loeb's method for determining where the meteor might have landed on Earth—claiming, e.g., that the seismic data used by the two astrophysicists had resulted not from an impact, but merely from nearby truck traffic.[19]
^abVaubaillon, J. (October 2022). "Hyperbolic meteors: is CNEOS 2014-01-08 interstellar?".WGN, Journal of the International Meteor Organization.50 (5):140–143.arXiv:2211.02305.Bibcode:2022JIMO...50..140V.
^Desch, Steve; Jackson, Alan (November 2023). "Critique of arXiv submission 2308.15623, "Discovery of Spherules of Likely Extrasolar Composition in the Pacific Ocean Site of the CNEOS 2014-01-08 (IM1) Bolide", by A. Loeb et al".arXiv:2311.07699 [astro-ph.EP].
^Desch, Steve (March 2024). "Be,La,U-rich spherules as microtektites of terrestrial laterites: What goes up must come down".arXiv:2403.05161 [astro-ph.EP].
^Loeb, Avi; et al. (29 August 2023). "Discovery of Spherules of Likely Extrasolar Composition in the Pacific Ocean Site of the CNEOS 2014-01-08 (IM1) Bolide".arXiv:2308.15623 [astro-ph.EP].
^abSiraj, Amir; Loeb, Abraham; Gallaudet, Tim (5 August 2022). "An Ocean Expedition by the Galileo Project to Retrieve Fragments of the First Large Interstellar Meteor CNEOS 2014-01-08".arXiv:2208.00092 [astro-ph.EP].
