No evidence for interstellar fireballs in the CNEOS database

Context. The detection of interstellar meteors, especially meteorite-dropping meteoroids, would be transformative, as this would enable direct sampling of material from other stellar systems on Earth. One candidate is the fireball observed by U.S. government sensors on January 8, 2014. It has been claimed that fragments of this meteoroid have been recovered from the ocean floor near Papua New Guinea and that they support an extrasolar origin. Based on its parameters reported in the Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) catalog, the fireball exhibits a hyperbolic excess velocity that indicates an interstellar origin; however, the catalog does not report parameter uncertainties. Aims. To achieve a clear confirmation of the fireball’s interstellar origin, we assessed the underlying error distributions of the catalog data. Our aim was also to confirm whether the fragments of this meteoroid survived passage through the atmosphere and assess all conditions needed to unambiguously determine the fragments’ origin. Methods. We approached the investigation of the entire catalog using statistical analyses and modeling, and we provide a comprehensive analysis of the individual hyperbolic CNEOS cases. Results. We have developed several independent arguments indicating substantial uncertainties in the velocity and radiant position of the CNEOS events. We determined that all the hyperbolic fireballs exhibit significant deviations from the majority of the events in one of their velocity components, and we show that such mismeasurements can produce spurious parameters. According to our estimation of the speed measurement uncertainty for the catalog, we found that it is highly probable that such a catalog containing only Sun-bound meteors would show at least one event that appears highly unlikely to be Sun-bound. We also establish that it is unlikely that any fragments from a fireball traveling at the high inferred velocities could survive passage through the atmosphere. When assuming a much lower velocity, some fragments of this meteoroid could survive; however, they would be of a common Solar System origin and thus highly probable to be indistinguishable from the quantity of other local micrometeorites that have gradually accumulated on the sea floor. Conclusions. We conclude that there is no evidence in the CNEOS data to confirm or reject the interstellar origin of any of the nominally hyperbolic fireballs in the CNEOS catalog. Therefore, the claim of an interstellar origin for the fireball recorded over Papua New Guinea in 2014 remains unsubstantiated. We have also gathered arguments that refute the claim that the collected spherules from the sea floor originated in the body of this fireball.