A “UNIQUE” celestial object has been caught hurtling through space at one million miles per hour – so fast it may leave the galaxy, according to Nasa.
The colossal object – roughly 27,306 times the size of Earth – was spotted by citizen scientists who were analysing data from Nasa’s WISE telescope.
The “new object”, dubbed CWISE J1249, has not yet been identified by experts, Nasa has revealed.
It’s about the same size as a star, but most known stars orbit the centre of the Milky Way peacefully.
It has a surprisingly low mass, which Nasa said makes CWISE J1249 particularly hard to identify.
The object could be a low mass star, but it may also be a brown dwarf if it doesn’t steadily fuse hydrogen in its core.
However, of the 4,000 other brown dwarfs discovered in the WISE imagery – none of them are close to travelling outside of the Milky Way and into intergalactic space.
CWISE J1249 might even be something in between a gas giant planet and a star.
But it has much less iron and other metals in it than other stars and brown dwarfs – so scientists have no concrete answers yet.
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This unusual composition suggests that CWISE J1249 is quite old, likely from one of the first generations of stars in our galaxy, according to Nasa.
“I can’t describe the level of excitement,” said Martin 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.”
Kabatnik discovered the object several years ago alongside colleagues Thomas P. Bickle, and Dan Caselden, but only published their findings in a study this month.
The study is led by the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 science team, which formed in 2017 to identify celestial objects from Nasa’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope.
One theory is that CWISE J1249 originally came from a binary system with a white dwarf, which exploded as a supernova when it pulled off too much material from its companion
Nasa
The breakneck speed CWISE J1249 is travelling at has also baffled scientists.
“One theory is that CWISE J1249 originally came from a binary system with a white dwarf, which exploded as a supernova when it pulled off too much material from its companion,” Nasa wrote.
“Another possibility is that it came from a tightly bound cluster of stars called a globular cluster, and a chance meeting with a pair of black holes sent it soaring away.”
Kyle Kremer, incoming assistant professor in UC San Diego’s Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, added: “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.”
Scientists are now set to examine the elemental composition – what the object is made of – for more clues about why it might be moving so fast.
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