A 2014 meteor may have come from another solar system
Such alien visitors could graze Earth’s atmosphere once a decade, scientists suggest
Earth may already have been visited by an object from outside our solar system — a meteor that burned up in the planet’s atmosphere in 2014, astronomers claim. If confirmed, it would be the first known interstellar object to have entered the atmosphere.
The first interstellar visitor known to have come close to Earth was the roughly 400-meter-wide asteroid named ‘Oumuamua. It swooped within about 24 million kilometers of the planet in October 2017 (SN: 11/25/17, p. 14). Its sharp-angled approach to the solar system and equally strange departure led astronomers to suggest that ‘Oumuamua could have been anything from a fluffy skeleton of a comet to an alien spaceship (SN Online: 2/27/19).