Amir Sirage was looking for a meteor.

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

At least he was dreaming about it.

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

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

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

A few years ago,

Amir had been a sophomore at Harvard University

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

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

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

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

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

north of Manus Island in Papua New Guinea.

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

This was not an ordinary space rock.

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

interstellar rock that had smashed into us.

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

He wanted to find it.

So he started thinking.

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

...