Fact Check: Before ‘Oumuamua visit, did an interstellar object hit Earth?

Artist’s impression of ‘Oumuamua. It was so far the only known interstellar object to make a fly-by of Earth; now scientists have found evidence that an earlier object may have entered Earth’s atmosphere. (European Space Observatory)

LAST YEAR, the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua generated worldwide interest — discovered in late 2017, it was then the first known object from outside the Solar System to do a fly-by of Earth. Harvard University astronomer Abraham Loeb made headlines recently by suggesting that ‘Oumuamua might have been part of an alien spacecraft. Now, Loeb and a colleague, Amir Siraj, have proposed that before ‘Oumuamua, there may have been another recent interstellar visitor — a meteor from another solar system may have actually hit Earth in 2014. It burned up in the atmosphere and fell into the South Pacific, they suggest in a paper upload on the preprint server arXiv.

How did they reach their conclusion? They searched NASA’s Near Earth Object Database to identify the fastest meteors with strange trajectories. If an object moves extremely fast, it can be a sign that it is not tied to an orbit around the sun. The object they spotted was about 0.9 m in diameter and travelling at about 60 km/sec when it burned up in January 2014. The researchers traced the object’s orbit back in time, and found that it might have come from the interior of another planetary or star system in the Milky Way. That would make the meteor the first known to have made the trip from outside the solar system to Earth. The researchers have submitted their paper to The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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Telling Numbers | German tourism board eyes 1 million mark in Indian visitors this year

ON THURSDAY, the India arm of the German National Tourist Board (GNTB) projected that the number of Indian tourists who stayed at least one night in Germany will likely reach 1 million by the end of this year. In 2018, around 9.22 lakh Indians who travelled to Germany stayed at least for a night, a year-on-year growth of more than 8%. “Our vision 2030 is to have 2 million overnights from India into Germany and we are right on track to achieve that,” PTI quoted Romit Theophilus, Director (India), German National Tourist Office (GNTO), as saying.

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Source: German National Tourist Board.

A GNTB report for tourism shows 852,224 overnight stays by Indian visitors in 2017. It states that the volume of overnight stays has increased by 102.2% between 2008 and 2017, at an average annual growth of 9%.

The GNTO’s tourism theme for this year is the centenary of the Bauhaus art movement that started in 1919 in Weimar. “Rabindranath Tagore inaugurated our own Indian Bauhaus, the Kala Bhavan, in Santiniketan in 1919. Like the Bauhaus, it developed a modernist language. In 1921, Tagore visited Weimar. The first major Bauhaus exhibition took place in Kolkata in 1922,” PTI quoted Jasper Wieck, Deputy Head of the German mission in India, as saying.