Plan to 'catch' meteorites with giant magnets

Astronomers are planning to collect a meteorite from another star system that crashed into the Pacific Ocean with an energy equivalent to 110 tons of TNT.

Simulation of meteorite rushing towards Earth.

The Harvard team hopes to find debris from the interstellar meteorite CNEOS 2014-01-08 that crashed into Earth on January 8, 2014. The discovery of such debris would represent humanity's first contact with matter larger than dust from beyond the Solar System, according to Amir Siraj, an astrophysicist at Harvard University and lead author of the study published on the ArXiv database on August 5.

Siraj identified the object's interstellar origin in a 2019 study with 99.999% certainty, but it was not until May 2022 that US Space Command confirmed his conclusion. No eyewitnesses saw the object crash into Earth. "The meteorite flew through the atmosphere about 160 kilometers off the coast of Papua New Guinea at midnight, with the energy of 1% of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima," Siraj said.

At 0.5 m wide, CNEOS 2014-01-08 is currently the first interstellar object discovered in the solar system. That title previously belonged to an elongated object called 'Oumuamua, discovered in 2017 via the Pan-STARRS observatory and traveling through the solar system at nearly 92,000km/h. CNEOS 2014-01-08 is thought to come from another star system because it moves 60 km/s, too fast to be affected by the Sun's gravity. According to Siraj, CNEOS 2014-01-08 exceeds the speed limit for objects attracted to the Sun. Since the meteorite did not come close to any other planets along the way, it must have originated from outside the solar system.

Siraj said he and his team will undertake a $1.6 million expedition to lower a bed-sized magnet at 1.3 degrees south latitude and 147.6 degrees east longitude, where the meteorite fell. determined by the US Department of Defense. That location is about 300 km north of Manus Island in the Bismarck Sea in the southwestern Pacific Ocean.

CNEOS 2014-01-08 has a material strength that far exceeds that of ordinary iron meteorites, making collection easier. Strength of a material refers to its ability to withstand deformation or damage due to weight. "Most meteorites contain enough iron to stick to the type of magnet that we plan to use for the sea exploration in the Galileo project," Siraj said. "Given the extremely high material strength, it is highly likely that the debris of CNEOS 2014-01-08 is ferromagnetic".

Sailing from Papua New Guinea, the Galileo project vessel will use a winch-mounted magnet to drag along the seabed at a depth of 1.7km for 10 days. The team hopes to be able to collect fragments as small as 0.1mm of the meteorite. However, they have not revealed the time of the expedition.