After almost exactly three years, the US government has confirmed a hypothesis by a pair of Harvard astrophysicists that an interstellar object crashed into the Pacific Ocean.
In a previously classified memo, US Space Command affirmed that a fireball seen off the coast of Papua New Guinea in 2014 was, in fact, the first interstellar meteor known to fall to Earth.
Although the Pentagon’s newest branch hasn’t revealed much more than what the researchers suspected, it is the first admission of its kind, an otherwise momentous finding weighed down by bureaucracy and red tape.
The conclusion itself isn’t new, Vice reports, but was originally drawn by Harvard theoretical astrophysist Amir Siraj and his mentor Avi Loeb in a 2019 preprint study.
Since then the pair have struggled to get their study peer reviewed due to the red tape surrounding the object.
Much of the information about the small meteor believed to have crashed into the South Pacific remained classified, forcing Siraj and Loeb to work around the US government.
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