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The Atlas Obscura Podcast

A Mission to find a Meteor with Amir Siraj

The Atlas Obscura Podcast

SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura

Society & Culture, Places & Travel

4.61.6K Ratings

🗓️ 19 March 2024

⏱️ 21 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Friend of the show Amir Siraj tells us the wild tale of his search for an interstellar object – a journey that led the astrophysicist to the bottom of the ocean floor.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Amir Sirage was looking for a meteor.

0:05.0

You know, I was laughing at myself at that point because it sounded so crazy.

0:10.0

At least he was dreaming about it.

0:13.0

I had a lot of dreams for this object, but you know most of them felt too silly to talk about.

0:22.0

And not just any meteor, one that had traveled across the universe,

0:28.0

and was now maybe, maybe, lying in teeny tiny pieces at the bottom of our ocean.

0:38.2

A few years ago,

0:39.5

Amir had been a sophomore at Harvard University

0:42.0

studying astrophysics, and as part of his work he combed through a

0:46.0

database of meteor impacts supplied by the Department of Defense and as he did, he spotted something strange.

0:55.0

I kept getting this one a weird result for a meteor that hit the earth in 2014. An object moving at an astonishing speed, something about the

1:08.8

size of a microwave that had smashed into Earth's atmosphere at 100,000 miles per hour.

1:15.0

This came down and exploded in the atmosphere about 20 kilometers above the Earth's surface,

1:22.0

north of Manus Island in Papua New Guinea.

1:26.8

So it was quite a spectacular explosion, I think like 1% of the Hiroshima bomb.

1:35.0

This was not an ordinary space rock.

1:38.0

A meir had discovered the first evidence of a meteor that had traveled from outside of our solar system, an

1:46.5

interstellar rock that had smashed into us.

1:49.8

But for Amir, it was not enough to just know it existed.

1:53.0

He wanted to find it.

1:56.4

So he started thinking.

1:57.4

It's a crazy idea, but what if we took a boat?

...

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