NASA’s citizen scientists have discovered a perplexing object traveling at an extraordinary speed through space, leaving experts dumbfounded.
The object, estimated to be over 27,306 times the size of Earth, is reportedly moving so rapidly through our galaxy that it might escape the Milky Way.
This enigmatic star-like entity was detected moving at an astonishing million miles per hour, located more than 400 light years away from Earth.
Citizen scientists involved in NASA’s Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project first identified the object.
Although the identity of the object is still unknown, experts suggest it could be a brown dwarf star, which is usually larger than a planet but does not have the mass to sustain long-term nuclear fusion in its core like the Earth’s sun.
If confirmed to be a brown dwarf star, it would represent the first documented case of such an object capable of escaping our galaxy due to its hyper-speed orbit.
“I can’t describe the level of excitement,” said Martin Kabatnick, a citizen scientist and long-time member of NASA’s Backyard Worlds project, in a statement.
“When I first saw how fast it was moving, I was convinced it must have been reported already,” he added.
Kabatnik collaborated with fellow citizen-scientists Thomas P. Bickle and Dan Caselden in the discovery. They have named the object CWISE J124909.08+362116.0, or CWISE J1249 for short.
Dr. Kyle Kremer, an astronomer who collaborated on understanding the potential brown dwarf, proposed several theories to explain the rapid movement of CWISE J1249.
One theory is that the object was catapulted out of a binary star system after its white dwarf sister star collapsed in a supernova, a nuclear fusion reaction.
Another theory suggests that CWISE J1249 may have originated from a globular cluster, a tight cluster of stars, where it escaped the gravitational pull of a black hole.
“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,” explained Dr. Kremer in a statement.
Currently, members of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, academics, and government scientists are drafting a report on these observations, which is awaiting peer review from Cornell’s arXiv site.
Overall, it appears that this object may indeed be the first of its kind.