Why did the government take it upon itself to keep hidden that an interstellar object has crashed on Earth ? No official media has given an answer to that question.
The event was revealed by the Vice portal to the astrophysics student and director of Interstellar Object Studies at Harvard’s Galileo Project , Amir Siraj .
The Interstellar Object Incident
Siraj, together with Avi Loeb , wrote an article explaining that an interstellar object fell into the Pacific. But that news was kept secret.
The team apparently took a long, hard look at NASA ‘s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies , or CNEOS , database of space rocks and meteorite impacts .
While searching for anomalies, they found a huge fireball that exploded near Manus Island in northern Papua New Guinea on January 8, 2014 .
The speed was over 200,000 kilometers per hour and the duo identified it as a “tiny space rock” 0.45 meters in diameter . Its origin could be the deep interior of the Solar System or a star in the thick disk of the Milky Way galaxy.
Siraj believes that some of the sensors used by CNEOS are operated by the US Department of Defense to detect nuclear detonations .
Without key data on the fireball’s velocity margin of error, both scientists failed to pass peer review and publish the paper.
6/ “I had the pleasure of signing a memo with @ussfspoc’s Chief Scientist, Dr. Mozer, to confirm that a previously-detected interstellar object was indeed an interstellar object, a confirmation that assisted the broader astronomical community.” pic.twitter.com/PGlIOnCSrW
— U.S. Space Command (@US_SpaceCom) April 7, 2022
But that changed when his request for the data reached Joel Mozer, chief scientist for Space Operations Command in the Space Force service component.
The restart of the investigation
Most surprisingly, Siraj and Loeb found out they had the permit through a Space Force tweet. Shown in the message is a memorandum dated March 1 and signed by Lieutenant General John E. Shaw , Deputy Commander of the Space Force.
Upon hearing about it, Siraj and Loeb resumed the search to publish the paper so that other expert researchers can search further for some other interstellar object.
Siraj will also ask astronomers to build a public meteor sensor network independent of the Department of Defense . This eliminates delays like your research .
He also plans to organize an expedition to the place where the interstellar object fell:
“It would be very ambitious, but we are going to analyze it in depth. Because the possibility of obtaining the first piece of interstellar material is exciting enough to verify this very thoroughly. And talk to all the world’s experts on ocean expeditions to recover meteorites.”
Many people hope that this time, the Space Force will not impede the investigation, since there are still questions about why this information was hidden. Is it possible that there is something else that they do not want us to know or was it simply a “mistake”?
