The 2019 Discovery of a Meteor of Interstellar Origin

Abstract

The earliest confirmed interstellar object, `Oumuamua, was discovered in the Solar System by Pan-STARRS in 2017, allowing for a calibration of the abundance of interstellar objects of its size $\sim 100$ m. This was followed by the discovery of Borisov, which allowed for a similar calibration of its size $\sim 0.4-1\mathrm{km}$. One would expect a much higher abundance of significantly smaller interstellar objects, with some of them colliding with Earth frequently enough to be noticeable. Based on the CNEOS catalog of bolide events, we identify the $\sim 0.45$m meteor detected at 2014-01-08 17:05:34 UTC as originating from an unbound hyperbolic orbit with 99.999\% confidence. The U.S. Department of Defense has since verified that "the velocity estimate reported to NASA is sufficiently accurate to indicate an interstellar trajectory." We infer that the meteor had an asymptotic speed of $v_{\infty }\sim 42.1\pm 5.5\mathrm{km}{\mathrm{s}}^{-1}$ outside of the solar system. Its origin is approximately towards R.A. $49.4\pm 4.1^{\circ }$ and declination $11.2\pm 1.8^{\circ }$, implying that its initial velocity vector was $58\pm 6\mathrm{km}{\mathrm{s}}^{-1}$ away from the velocity of the Local Standard of Rest (LSR). Its high LSR speed implies a possible origin from the deep interior of a planetary system or a star in the thick disk of the Milky Way galaxy. The local number density of its population is $10^{6{}_{-1.5}^{+0.75}}\mathrm{A}{\mathrm{U}}^{-3}$ or $9\times 10^{21{}_{-1.5}^{+0.75}}\mathrm{p}{\mathrm{c}}^{-3}$ (necessitating 0.2 -- 20 Earth masses of material to be ejected per local star). We show that the detections of CNEOS 2014-01-08, `Oumuamua, and Borisov collectively imply that the differential size distribution in good agreement with a collisional distribution, with a power-law slope is $q\sim 3.6\pm 0.5$, where the quoted uncertainty corresponds to $2\sigma$.

6 pages, 2 figures; accepted for publication in ApJ

References in corpus (1)

• Analysis of June 2, 2016 bolide event

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