English

Expected Fragment Distribution from the First Interstellar Meteor CNEOS 2014-01-08

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2023-04-19 v3

Abstract

In 2014, the fireball of the first interstellar meteor CNEOS 2014-01-08 (IM1) (Siraj & Loeb 2019), was detected off the northern coast of Papua New Guinea. A recently announced ocean expedition will retrieve any extant fragments by towing a magnetic sled across a 10 km x 10 km area of ocean floor approximately 300 km north of Manus Island (Siraj, Loeb, & Gallaudet 2022). We formulate a model that includes both the probabilistic mass distribution of meteor fragments immediately after the fragmentation event, the ablation of the fragments, and the geographic distribution of post-ablation fragments along the ground track trajectory of the bulk fragment cloud. We apply this model to IM1 to provide a heuristic estimate of the impactor's post-ablation fragment mass distribution, constructed through a Monte Carlo simulation. We find between ~8% and ~21% of fragments are expected to survive ablation with a mass \geq .001 g, depending on the impactor's empirical yield strength. We also provide an estimation for the geographic distribution of post-ablation fragments.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2212.00839,
  title  = {Expected Fragment Distribution from the First Interstellar Meteor CNEOS 2014-01-08},
  author = {Amory Tillinghast-Raby and Abraham Loeb and Amir Siraj},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.00839},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T07:19:55.174Z