Professor Avi Loeb (Host)

And another example is the discovery of interstellar meteors, one of which I went after in the Pacific Ocean from 2014.

And it's all in a catalog that was compiled from data collected by US government satellites that are monitoring the Earth for ballistic missile launches.

I mean, obviously, the data was used.

in the war with Iran, but at the same time, they see fireballs from objects colliding with earth, these are meteors, and they release those to the scientific community.

And every now and then there is an object moving faster than the escape speed from the solar system that we discover.

And the most recent was on April 1st,

We discovered it with my postdoc.

The only reason I discovered it is because there was a meteor over Boston and the same catalog reported about that.

So I went to the catalog and saw the meteor over Boston on May 30th.

And then down the list, a few places was the meteor from April 1st, 2026.

And I saw, wow, this one is moving really fast.

And it came along the pole of the earth, the rotation pole of the earth.

So the earth, the rotation pole of the earth is almost perpendicular to within 23 degrees.

from the orbital plane of the Earth around the Sun.

So if something comes along the pole, you don't need to correct that velocity relative to as a result of the motion of the Earth around the Sun.

So I already knew just from the velocity along the pole that it's interstellar.

And I told my postdoc, let's

Let's do a detailed calculation.

We did that and we submitted, we posted the paper about that.

So we are discovering interstellar meteors thanks to the US government satellites.