Scientists want to catch a meteorite. They will use a huge magnet

Astronomers plan to catch a small meteor that landed in the Pacific Ocean in 2014. They intend to use a huge magnet for this.

The Harvard University team hopes to find bits of an interstellar rock known as CNEOS on 1/8/2014 that hit Earth on January 8, 2014 off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Parts of the facility are believed to be located about 300 kilometers north of Manus Island in the southwest Pacific Ocean.

Although most body fragments must burn up after entering the atmosphere, the Harvard team of astrophysicists Avi Loeb And Amir Siraj – we think it’s worth trying to extract the wreckage from the ocean. According to them, CNEOS 2014-01-08 may come from a different star system, but this has not yet been officially confirmed.

The body was about 0.5 meters wide and was moving at a speed of 60 km per second. His ocean fishing plan depends on Dropping a huge magnet into the water; The value of the entire project is estimated at 1.6 million US dollars (more than 7.3 million PLN).

“Most meteorites contain enough iron to stick to the type of magnet we plan to use on a cruise. Due to their extremely high physical strength, it is very likely that the CNEOS fragments are ferromagnetic,” Amir Siraj said.

It should be noted that It may be the third known object outside our solar system known to mankind. Other “newcomers” of this type are comets Borisov and Oumuamua. According to Webb, the latter may be a legacy of space technology.

Adam Jafar, journalist at Wirtualna Polska