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[i]In 2014, a half-ton, couch-sized meteor entered the atmosphere above Papua New Guinea, brightening the night sky. It may sound like a threat, but once a meteor such as this enters our atmosphere it generally burns up. This space rock caused a loud flash and bang captured on observatory cameras, but there are 25 million meteor entries of various sizes around Earth every day, so no one gave it a second thought. At first. But Avi Loeb, a Harvard University astrophysicist, and his student Amir Siraj saw something else in that remote bolide explosion: Five years after the meteor appeared in 2019, they looked at the data on it from NASA JPL's Center for Near Earth Object Studies. They saw something fast. They saw something powerful. They saw, in short, something from outside our Solar System. "It appeared to be a head-on collision," Loeb tells Inverse. Loeb and Siraj made their discovery while on the hunt for fast fireballs, the kind of meteor that strikes our upper atmosphere at such a velocity that they could have hurtled in from interstellar space. But nobody else saw what they did, and their paper on the object was rejected by the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Now, three years after their discovery, a letter from the United State Space Command to NASA chief scientist Thomas Zurbuchen relayed that Space Force had looked into their results: Loeb and Siraj's measurements were seemingly correct.[/i]
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