Photo: NASA/W.M. Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko
A trio of citizen scientists working with NASA have discovered a strange object hurtling through our galaxy at one million miles per hour. Martin Kabatnik, Thomas P. Bickle, and Dan Caselden were assisting with NASA's Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project and noticed "a faint, fast-moving object called CWISE J124909.08+362116.0."
After conducting follow-up observations from ground-based telescopes, they discovered the strange object was traveling fast enough to exit the Milky Way.
"I can't describe the level of excitement," 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."
NASA noted that while the object is more than 27,000 times the size of the Earth, it is relatively small compared to most objects in the universe. It is also believed to be one of the first stars ever to have formed in our galaxy based on its low metal content.
"It could be a low-mass star, or if it doesn't steadily fuse hydrogen in its core, it would be considered a brown dwarf, putting it somewhere between a gas giant planet and a star," NASA said in a news release.
Scientists are unsure why it is moving so fast, but they have several ideas. One hypothesis is that it was ejected by a supernova from a white dwarf star. Another theory suggests that the object was violently thrown through space by a pair of black holes.
"When a star encounters a black hole binary, the complex dynamics of this three-body interaction can toss that star right out of the globular cluster," says Kyle Kremer, incoming assistant professor in UC San Diego's Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics.