The new impact of the interstellar object on Earth

The famous interstellar object with comet activity 3I/Atlas is currently at the beginning of June 2026 about 1000 million kilometers from us and is rapidly moving away never to return, we can wait for the next one. It is suspected that with the new astronomical observatories we should find several interstellar objects a year.

Perhaps this summer we will capture one, which would be number four, and in the coming years we will have probes or ships prepared to hunt for one of these travelers from other stars, but what if it were not necessary to travel to space to see with our own hands something created many light years away and possibly much older than the sun? There is a small, but not zero, possibility that interstellar meteorites will impact Earth and we have news about one of them.

A possible impact of an interstellar object has been discovered with the name Polar-IM, polar because of the type of trajectory it had, I for interstellar and M for meteorite, it does not have numbering because, although there are candidates, there is still no official list of interstellar meteorites. There are candidates and this one from Argentina would not be the first, according to Avi Loeb's research, the candidates for that future list would be, the first and most famous, impacted on January 8, 2014 in the South Pacific Ocean, off the northeast coast of Papua, New Guinea.

It is estimated that it would be an object half a meter in diameter and weighing about 460 kg. It must have been quite dense, at the moment it is the only one that has motivated a search operation and according to Avi Loeb some fragments were recovered, but the authenticity of these fragments is currently a topic of intense debate, it has not yet been confirmed.

The second impact occurred on March 9, 2017 over the North Atlantic Ocean, near Portugal to the west of the Iberian Peninsula. It is estimated that the object would have been about 1 m in diameter and must also have been quite dense with a mass of about 2.7 to 6 tons. The third was recorded on July 28, 2022. It impacted the Eastern Tropical Pacific Ocean, approximately 600 km west of Peru. This would be the largest at the moment, it would have 1.8 m in diameter and a mass of 6.4 tons, and it exploded at about 37.5 m high, releasing an energy of 0.69 kilotons. The fourth hit on February 12, 2025 in the Barens Sea, in the Arctic, between Norway and Russia. It would have an approximate diameter of 1.2 m and a mass of 2.2 tons.

Although we have little data on size and mass, we may have some clue as to what that object was like. The higher the mass and smaller the size, the more likely it is that the object was metallic, and the lower the mass and larger the size, the more likely it is that the object was composed, perhaps it was a block of ice covered in dust and some rocks. And now we would have this fifth interstellar object, captured on April 1, 2026 and recorded in the data of NASA's Near-Earth Object Studies Center.

This interstellar object would be approximately less than half a meter in diameter, its size would range from that of a soccer ball to a beach ball with a mass of about 150 kg. It exploded at about 90.5 m high over the South Atlantic Ocean east of Argentina. The explosion generated only 0.086 kilotons of TNT, so it would be much smaller than the fireball that exploded in the upper atmosphere near Boston in the United States, on May 30.

Although it is the smallest on the list that I mentioned before, the one studied by Avi Loeb and his collaborators, it turns out that it is the one that has the most points in favor right now to be officially recognized as of interstellar origin. According to Avi Loeb there is a 99.997% chance that it is interstellar.

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