Over the past five years, I discovered with my student, Amir Siraj, two interstellar meteors in the CNEOS fireball catalog of NASA: IM1 — detected on January 8, 2014 near Papua New Guinea, and IM2 — detected on March 9, 2017 near Portugal. This constitutes half of the four interstellar…

In a new paper with my student, Amir Siraj, we have identified a second interstellar meteor, IM2, in the CNEOS fireball catalog of NASA. The two interstellar meteors are meter-scale objects that collided with Earth from a trajectory that was gravitationally unbound to the Sun. In other words, the objects…

The Sun is a common star at present and its lifetime is comparable to the age of the Universe. This is not a coincidence. If the Sun had died by now, the Earth would have not been habitable and we would not be observing the cosmos through terrestrial telescopes. But…

Wonderful news! We just received full funding for the Galileo Project expedition to scoop the fragments of the first interstellar meteor (IM1), CNEOS 2014–01–08, that landed on the Pacific Ocean floor near Papua New Guinea (PNG). The funds are donated by individuals who approached me out of the blue after…

We live life with our attention mostly focused on the two-dimensional surface of Earth. On rare occasions space items creep into the news in the context of communication satellites, spaceflight missions to the Moon or other Solar system destinations, or new astronomical observations of more distant sources. It would only…

From a large interstellar distance, a technological civilization like ours appears like an engine fueled by starlight and nutrients on a rocky planet and spewing electromagnetic signals and rockets to outer space. Identifying primitive forms of life based on the composition of a planet’s atmosphere or its appearance as a…

Upon returning to my Harvard office at the start of the academic year, I noticed on my desk the printed agenda of the last in-person faculty meeting that I led as chair of the Astronomy department in March 2020. The first agenda item was: “What to do about COVID-19?” Two…

The Artemis Program of NASA will soon deliver humans back to the Moon. It has been half a century since the last human, Commander Gene Cernan, stepped on the lunar surface during the Apollo 17 mission on December 13, 1972. Once a lunar base for humans is established, an important…

We go through life feeling powerless that it may end any day and so we seek a greater meaning by belonging to a theme bigger than our existence. Even the physical foundation of our existence was inherited from our parents, just like a car delivered to us from a dealer…