US military confirms an interstellar meteor collided with Earth

By Mia Stevens

One meteor came a long distance from home to pay us a visit.

According to a recently disclosed the United States Space Command document, researchers uncovered the first known interplanetary meteor to have impacted Earth. An uncommon occurrence, an interstellar meteor is a space rock that originates from outside our solar system.
CNEOS 2014-01-08 is the name of the spacecraft that crashed on the northeast coast of Papua New Guinea on January 8, 2014.

Amir Siraj, who recognized the item as an interstellar meteor in a 2019 article he coauthored as an undergraduate at Harvard University, was taken aback by the discovery.

Siraj was working with Harvard University professor of science Abraham Loeb on a study of Oumuamua, the first known interstellar object discovered in our solar system in 2017.
Siraj proceeded to search NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies database for more interstellar objects, and within days he discovered what he thought was an interstellar meteor