The continued search for interstellar meteors
Disclaimer: This post is a bit nerdy. It doesn’t contain any conjecture about the current state of the bizarre situation wrt extraterrestrial intelligence and the USG as portrayed in the popular media (as well as on the floor of Congress.) Again, I don’t anticipate anything worth noting on that front until perhaps the next expedition to the IM1 impact zone and I don’t want to waste everyone’s time.
After seeing the above videos on social media and seeing its estimated very high speed relative to Earth reported by the ESA (~28 miles per second), I was curious to know whether this brilliant display came to us from another star system (and I was too impatient to wait for Avi.) Although I have no astrophysics background, I was roughly familiar with what it would take to determine the answer given Avi Loeb’s team’s papers regarding IM1 and IM2. In these papers, use of a software package called REBOUND is cited. I knew their data source was the CNEOS fireball catalog so I set to figuring out how to use the software (along with Astropy) to determine the answer. It took about two days of tinkering with it to come up with sane output.
This plot only includes the inner solar system to make it more readable but the simulation used to calculate this orbit included all of the major planets’ orbital parameters by querying JPL Horizons’ data. The black ellipse represents the meteor’s final turn around the Sun and into Earth. The “Vhel” value was the velocity of the meteor relative to the Sun at the time of impact. In order for the meteor not to have been bound to the solar system this value would’ve had to have been about 41.2 km/s. For reference, Earth’s Vhel is around 30 km/s.
