Astronomers are planning a fishing trip to land an extraterrestrial interloper on Earth: a small meteorite from another star system that crashed into the Pacific Ocean with energy equivalent to about 121 tons of TNT.

The team from Harvard University hopes to find fragments of this interstellar rock - known as CNEOS 2014-01-08 - which crashed into Earth on January 8, 2014.

"Finding such a fragment would represent the first contact humanity has ever had with material larger than dust from beyond the solar system," Amir Siraj, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, told LiveScience.

Siraj identified the object's interstellar origin in a 2019 study with 99,999% confidence, but it was not until May 2022 that Siraj was confirmed by the US Space Command. There are no known witnesses to the object that hit Earth.

"It hit the atmosphere about 160 kilometers off the coast of Papua New Guinea in the middle of the night with about 1% of the energy of the Hiroshima bomb," Siraj said.

Measuring just 0.5 meters across, CNEOS 2014-01-08 now appears to have been the first interstellar object ever discovered in our solar system.

Previously, an elongated object called 'Oumuamua held that title. Discovered in 2017, the space rock flew through our solar system at about 92.000 km/h and later Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, a colleague of Siraj's, claimed it could be an alien object.

The discovery of Oumuamua was followed in 2019 by 2I/Borisov, the first interstellar comet, which was spotted by amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov in Crimea.

CNEOS 2014-01-08 is thought to be from another star system because it was traveling 60 kilometers per second relative to the Sun. This is too fast to be bound by the Sun's gravity.

"At Earth's distance from the Sun, any object traveling faster than about 42 kilometers per second is on an unbounded, hyperbolic escape trajectory relative to the Sun," Siraj said.

"This means that CNEOS 2014-01-08 was clearly exceeding the local velocity limit for bound objects and did not cross paths with any other planets along the way, so it must have originated from outside the Solar System."

The meteorite fragments are thought to be 300 km north of Manu Island in the Bismarck Sea in the southwest Pacific Ocean.

However, it is unclear when the astronomers will be able to launch their expedition. The Galileo project already has $500.000 pledged, with another $1.1 million needed to make it a reality.