The Amazingly Fast Meteor Over New Zealand on January 30, 2026 is Not Interstellar in Origin
On January 30, 2026 at 10:25:37 UTC, a bright green fireball from a meteor was spotted over Wellington Harbour, New Zealand (as reported here). The meteoroid was moving at an amazing speed of 71 kilometers per second relative to Earth. By itself, this speed is very close to the maximum value possible for the impact of an object bound to the Solar System with Earth. The upper limit on the impact speed of Solar System meteors follows from the following simple reasoning.
The Earth orbits the Sun at a speed of v=29.8 kilometers per second. This follows from balancing the centrifugal acceleration v²/r with the Sun’s gravitational acceleration, GM/r², where r is the radius of the Earth’s orbit, G is Newton’s constant and M is the mass of the Sun. The result is: v²=GM/r. On the other hand, the speed required to escape from the Sun’s gravitational potential at the radius r is obtained by balancing the kinetic energy per unit mass, 0.5(v_e)², with the potential energy, GM/r. This gives an escape speed that larger than the Earth’s speed v by a factor of the square root of 2, yielding v_e=1.414*v=42.1 kilometers per second. The largest speed of a Solar System meteor relative to Earth is obtained for an Oort Cloud bolide which happens to collide with Earth head on, opposite to the motion of Earth around the Sun.
The upper limit on the relative speed of a Solar System meteor is therefore: (29.8+42.1)=71.9 kilometers per second. This is very close to the speed of the recently discovered meteor. Hence, this meteor could have originated from the Solar System if it collided with Earth head on, opposite to its motion around the Sun. If not, then its high relative speed would imply that it is interstellar in origin. What do we know about interstellar meteors?
In June 2023, I led an expedition to the Pacific Ocean aiming to retrieve materials from the first recognized interstellar meteor, IM1 (as reported here). This meteor was detected on January 8, 2014 at 17:05:33 UTC. Its velocity relative to Earth was only 45 kilometers per second, but it arrived from behind the motion of the Earth around the Sun. Correcting for the Earth’s motion implied a speed of 60 kilometers per second relative to the Sun, well above the escape threshold of v_e=42.1 kilometers per second for Solar System objects (as derived in the discovery paper here). Indeed, the U.S. Space Command confirmed the interstellar origin of IM1 at the 99.999% confidence level (as documented here).
The IM1 impact site was localized based on the light radiated from the IM1’s fireball, which was detected by sensors aboard U.S. Government satellites. The light curve of the fireball showed three successive detonations separated by a tenth of a second from each other, with the last flare being the brightest and at a ram-pressure of 200 megapascals. This stress is four times higher than the maximum ram-pressure up to which the toughest iron meteorites from the solar-system survive. Indeed, IM1 displayed the highest material strength among all meteors in the CNEOS fireball catalog of NASA/JPL. The expedition recovered submillimeter-scale spherules (molten droplets) with a chemical composition that is different from known solar system materials. Upon entering the solar system, IM1 moved with an interstellar velocity of about 60 kilometers per second relative to the Local Standard of Rest of the Milky-Way galaxy, similar to that of 3I/ATLAS. The ocean expedition was documented in a Netflix documentary and a new book to be released within the coming year.
Is the 2026–01–30 meteor of interstellar origin as well? To find out, I used the velocity components, latitude, longitude and altitude data compiled by the CNEOS fireball database here and corrected for the Earth’s motion in collaboration with my postdoc Richard Cloete, to find out that the velocity of this meteor relative to the Sun was 42.4 kilometers per second, very close to the escape threshold of v_e=42.1 kilometers per second. The difference between the two is within the measurement uncertainties. Since the local abundance of Solar System objects is a few orders of magnitude larger than that of interstellar objects, this meteor most likely originated in the Solar System. The 2026 meteor over New-Zealand collided with Earth nearly head-on and probably originated in the outer Solar System.
In contrast from IM1 which exploded at an altitude of 18.7 kilometers over the Pacific Ocean, this new meteor exploded at a much higher altitude of 89.0 kilometers — implying a much lower material strength since the Earth’s atmosphere is highly rarefied at this altitude. This inference is consistent with the expected properties of a fragile iceberg from the Oort Cloud which could disintegrate at a low ram-pressure. Both fireballs radiated similar amounts of energy of about 3.82x10^{10} Joules, suggesting bolides with a radii of order 0.4–0.5 meters.
Here’s hoping that in the coming years we will witness the crash of an interstellar object that shows the characteristics of a Voyager-like probe from an extraterrestrial technological civilization that launched it from another star a few billion years ago. After all, most stars formed billions of years before the Sun and our own Voyager spacecraft will reach the opposite side of the Milky-Way disk within that time difference (as I calculated here with my student Shokhruz Kakharov). The search for interstellar meteors continues!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
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