An enormous celestial object over 27,000 times larger than Earth is hurtling through the galaxy at such high speeds it threatens to escape the Milky Way altogether and blast off into intergalactic space.
The rogue object has been spotted racing through the galaxy at speeds of over 1,200,000mph- nearly 1,500 times the speed of sound.
Although scientists have not yet determined what exactly the celestial object is, it is thought to be a ‘brown dwarf’; a star which is larger than a planet not big enough to sustain long-term nuclear fusion like the Sun.
The body is believed to have a mass around 80 times the size of Jupiter, which puts it right on the borderline of a star and a brown dwarf, which are sometimes referred to as ‘failed stars’.
It was discovered by a group of citizen-scientists in collaboration with NASA’s ‘Backyard Worlds: Planet 9’ project, the space agency confirmed this week.
‘I can’t describe the level of excitement,’ German citizen-scientist Martin Kabatnik, a long-time member of NASA’s Backyard Worlds program, said in a statement.
‘When I first saw how fast it was moving, I was convinced it must have been reported already.’
Although it is unknown what caused the object to blast off into space at such hypersonic speeds, scientists have speculated it may have rocketed out of its solar system after a nearby ‘white dwarf’ star died and collapsed in on itself, causing a massive nuclear reaction known as a supernova.
Another theory is that the object, nicknamed CWISE J1249, was flung free from the pull of a black hole, which caused it to slingshot off into outer space.
‘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’ NASA astronomer Dr Kyle Kremer explained in a statement.
After being flagged by the citizen scientists, a team of astronomers followed up on the discovery using the Keck I Telescope, a 10-meter telescope located a dormant volcano Maunakea, in Hawai’i.
Team leader Adam Burgasser told Space.com: ‘We discovered a very low-mass object, right on the star/brown dwarf mass boundary, that has an extreme velocity, moving fast enough that it may actually be unbound to the Milky Way galaxy.
‘It joins a collection of “hypervelocity” stars that have been found over the past few decades, most of which are thousands of light-years from the sun, whereas this source is a “mere” 400 light-years away.’
He added: ‘This discovery mainly opens up a new pathway to studying brown dwarfs that are in remote regions of the Milky Way, including its centre, its halo and its various globular clusters and satellites.
‘All of these systems are too far away to study brown dwarfs in detail directly, but if they get thrown at us, it’s much easier!’
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