Citizen scientists working on NASA’s Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project have made a groundbreaking discovery, finding an object moving at such high speed that it will escape the Milky Way’s gravity and shoot into intergalactic space. This hypervelocity object has a mass similar to or less than that of a small star.
The discovery was made possible by images from NASA’s WISE mission, which mapped the sky in infrared light from 2009 to 2011. The project uses these images to search for moving objects in the galaxy.
Follow-up observations with several ground-based telescopes confirmed the discovery and characterized the object, now known as CWISE J1249. This hypervelocity object is zooming out of the Milky Way at about 1 million miles per hour.
CWISE J1249 stands out not only because of its speed but also due to its low mass, making it difficult to classify as a celestial object. It could be a low-mass star or a brown dwarf, which is somewhere between a gas giant planet and a star.
What makes this discovery even more unique is that CWISE J1249 has much less iron and other metals than other stars and brown dwarfs. This unusual composition suggests that it is quite old, likely from one of the first generations of stars in our galaxy.
Scientists are still unsure why CWISE J1249 moves at such high speed, but two possible scenarios have been proposed: it could be a remnant from a binary system with a white dwarf or it could have originated from a globular cluster and was sent soaring away by a chance encounter with a pair of black holes.
The discovery is a testament to the power of collaboration between professionals and volunteers. Citizen scientists like Martin Kabatnik, Thomas P. Bickle, and Dan Caselden were instrumental in spotting the object, and software written by Frank Kiwy helped facilitate the finding.
Source: https://science.nasa.gov/get-involved/citizen-science/nasa-citizen-scientists-spot-object-moving-1-million-miles-per-hour/