TEMPLE, Texas — Faster than a speeding... star?
Citizen Scientists working with NASA's Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project have helped discover an object moving at a staggering speed, estimated to be around 1 million miles per hour.
To put that into perspective, LiveScience says the speed of sound on Earth (depending on altitude and temperature) is about 761 miles per hour.
The object is moving so fast in fact, NASA said it is expected to escape the Milky Way's gravity and shoot out into intergalactic space. NASA said the object has a mass similar to or less than a small star, and is the first object of its mass to be observed at such speeds.
Backyard Worlds is a citizen science project where citizens can help search for brown dwarfs or a large planet at the fringes of the solar system using images from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Explorer (WISE) mission, which mapped the sky in infrared light from 2009 to 2011 and again from 2013 to Aug. 8, 2024.
According to NASA, Citizen Scientists Martin Kabatnik, Thomas P. Bickle and Dan Caselden spotted a "faint, fast-moving object", now called CWISE J124909.08+362116.0, in the WISE images.
Follow-up observations with multiple ground-based telescopes helped scientists confirm and categorize the object, NASA said. Kabatnik, Bickle and Caselden are now co-authors on the team's study about the discovery, which is published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“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.”
According to NASA, CWISE J1249 is notable not only for its blistering speed, but also for its low mass, which makes it difficult to classify. Scientists believe the object could be either a low-mass star or could be considered a brown dwarf, an object less massive than a star but larger than a planet.
NASA says brown dwarfs are not rare, with the Backyard Worlds project alone having discovered over 4,000 of them, but none of them have been seen to be moving this fast.
CWISE J1249 also has a unique makeup, said NASA, having much less iron and other metals than other stars and brown dwarfs. This could reportedly mean it is from one of the first generations of stars in the galaxy, according to NASA.
So why is CWISE J1249 moving so fast? NASA listed two theories. One, the object came from a binary system with a white dwarf, which exploded as a supernova when it pulled too much material from its companion, and two, it came from a tightly bound cluster of stars called a globular cluster and was slung away by a pair of black holes.
NASA said scientists will study the elemental composition of CWISE J1249 more to find clues as to which explanation is more likely.
Want to be a citizen scientist yourself? Visit NASA's Citizen Science page at this link!
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