Over the past two weeks, I have circumnavigated the globe by land, air and sea. The reason? A kitchen sink–sized chunk of interstellar material that my colleagues and I believe collided with the Earth at 100,000 miles per hour nearly a decade ago. After years of effort, we may have finally found pieces of this elusive object on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, about a mile beneath the waves.
The story began in April 2019, when I found what’s thought to be the first known interstellar meteor, hiding in plain sight in publicly accessible data sourced from the U.S. government. Called IM1, this object had burned up in the atmosphere and rained fragments down into the ocean off the coast of Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, five years prior, registering as an anomalously speedy and bright fireball in the sensors of secret spy satellites operated by the U.S. Department of Defense. Working with my then-adviser, the Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, I analyzed the U.S. government data to show how the trajectory and other properties of IM’s fireball were consistent with the meteor having an interstellar origin.
It seemed at first too good to be true; scientists had been searching for interstellar meteors for at least seven decades, and here I was, a sophomore in college sitting in my dorm room, thinking I’d bagged one. And sure enough, there was a catch—but it had nothing to do with my calculations. Because the data came from spy satellites, the U.S. government didn’t publish how precise the measurements were. And without knowing the level of precision, we couldn’t know for sure whether IM1 was truly interstellar, or just a fluke.
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