NASA spots mysterious object moving at 1 million miles per hour

Citizen scientists collaborate with NASANASA’s Backyard Worlds project has discovered a unique hypervelocity object, CWISE J1249, that is rapidly exiting Earth’s atmosphere. milky way.

Thanks to infrared images taken by NASA’s WISE mission, the discovery includes contributions from amateur astronomers who determined its unusual speed and composition. The object, which may be a low-mass star or brown dwarf, exhibits a rare composition that suggests an ancient origin. Theories about its high speed include interactions with supernovae or black holes, suggesting a dynamic past within the universe.

Discovery of a super-fast object

Most of the familiar stars orbit peacefully around the center of the Milky Way. However, Citizen scientists Work on NASA’s Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project helped discover an object moving so fast that it would escape the Milky Way’s gravity and be hurled into intergalactic space. This ultrafast object is the first of its kind to be found with a mass similar to or less than that of a small star.

Backyard Worlds uses images from NASA. wiseor Wide-field Infrared Explorer, a mission that mapped the sky using infrared light from 2009 to 2011. It was reactivated as NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) in 2013 and decommissioned on August 8, 2024.

Amazing achievement by citizen scientists

A few years ago, Backyard Worlds veteran citizen scientists Martin Kabatnik, Thomas B. Pickle, and Dan Casselden spotted a faint, fast-moving object, called CWISE J124909.08+362116.0, moving across their screens in WISE images. Follow-up observations with several ground-based telescopes helped the scientists confirm the discovery and characterize the object. These citizen scientists are now co-authors of the team’s study on the discovery, published in the journal WISE. Astrophysical Journal Letters (Pre-print version available) here).

“I can’t describe how exciting it was,” said Kabatnik, a citizen scientist from Nuremberg, Germany. “When I first saw how fast it was moving, I was convinced it must have been reported already.”

CWISE J1249 Mystery Solved

CWISE J1249 is moving away from the Milky Way at about a million miles per hour. But it also has a low mass, making it difficult to classify as a celestial object. It could be a low-mass star, or if it isn’t steadily fusing hydrogen in its core, it would be considered a brown dwarf, which would put it somewhere between a gas giant planet and a star.

Regular brown dwarfs aren’t that rare. Volunteers with the Backyard Worlds: Planet Nine program have discovered more than 4,000 of them! But none are known to be on their way out of the galaxy.

This new object has another unique property. Data obtained using the WM Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, show that it contains much less iron and other metals than other stars and brown dwarfs. This unusual composition suggests that CWISE J1249 is very old, and likely belongs to one of the first generations of stars in our galaxy.

Theories behind the quick escape

Why is this object moving so fast? One hypothesis is that CWISE J1249 originally came from a binary system with white dwarfThis galaxy exploded as a supernova when it sucked in a large amount of matter from its companion. Another possibility is that it came from a tightly bound group of stars called a globular cluster, and then a chance encounter with a pair of black holes sent it soaring away.

When one star meets another, Black hole “The complex dynamics of this interaction between the three objects could have kicked this star out of the globular cluster,” says Kyle Creamer, a new assistant professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at UC San Diego.

Scientists will look closely at the elemental composition of CWISE J1249 for clues about which scenario is most likely.

Cooperative Science in Action

The discovery was the result of a multi-level team effort—a collaboration between volunteers, professionals, and students. Kabatnik credits other citizen scientists with helping him with the search, including Melina Thevenot, “who blew my mind with her personal blog about doing searches using the Astronomy Data Query Language,” he said. Software written by citizen scientist Frank Kiwi was also instrumental in the discovery, he added.

The study was led by Adam Burgasser, a science team member on the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project and a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and included co-authors Hunter Brooks and Austin Rothermich, astronomy students who began their careers in astronomy as citizen scientists.

Join the search for cosmic phenomena

Want to help discover the next extraordinary space object? Join Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 Now – participation is open to anyone in any country in the world.

Reference: “Discovery of a Hypervelocity L Dwarf Star at the Star/Brown Dwarf Mass Boundary” by Adam J. Burgasser, Roman Gerasimov, Kyle Kremer, Hunter Brooks, Efrain Alvarado, Adam C. Schneider, Aaron M. Meissner, Christopher A. Thiessen, Emma Softich, Prithi Karpur, Thomas P. Bickel, Martin Kabatnik, Austin Rothermich, Dan Casseldine, J. Davey Kirkpatrick, Jacqueline K. Faherty, Sarah L. Caswell, and Mark J. Kushnir, August 8, 2024, Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Digital Document Number: 10.3847/2041-8213/ad6607