NASA has discovered a mysterious object that is moving at a speed of more than 1.5 million km/h.

Our universe continues to surprise us with each new revelation. In this case, it was a group of citizen scientists (Martin Kabatnik, Thomas P. Bickle, and Dan Caselden) involved in NASA’s Backworlds: Planet 9 project that discovered unique hypervelocity object. WISE data, combined with ground-based tracking, helped astronomers characterize this rare space object. It has been named CWISE J1249, And It is moving so fast that NASA believes it will quickly escape the influence of the Milky Way. The discovery is based on infrared images from NASA’s WISE mission, as well as data from amateur astronomers, which determined its unusual speed and composition.

What is this object?

Amateur astronomers have discovered an object that It was moving at a staggering speed of 1.5 million kilometers per hour.a rarity in the quiet orbits of the Milky Way. This is the first time such a fast and compact celestial object has been discovered. It is very fast and has very low mass. -which complicates its classification-. It appears to be a low-mass star or brown dwarf (star-like objects that never reach enough mass to start fusing hydrogen in their core), and its sparse composition suggests that the object is quite old.

“I can’t describe the level of excitement,” said Kabatnik, of Nuremberg, Germany, a co-author of a study describing the discovery in the journal. Letters from the Astrophysical Journal. “When I first saw how fast it was moving, I was convinced it had already been reported.”

And how is it possible to travel so fast in space?

J1249’s mass and speed make it difficult to classify it as a star or a brown dwarf.which is causing a major debate among scientists. The researchers have two possible explanations. First, the object was in a binary system with a white dwarf, where the companion star stole enough material to go supernova, giving it such a colossal boost that it sent CWISE J1249 flying into space.

Another possibility is that the object was inside a globular cluster and had a close encounter with a pair of black holes orbiting each other. Although the object emerged from this interaction undamaged, it was ejected from the cluster at high speed. As a result, it is likely that CWISE J1249 will end at some point. leaving the galaxyIn fact, according to NASA, it is moving so fast that it is expected to leave the Milky Way Galaxy and head into the vast darkness of intergalactic space.

“When a star collides with a binary black hole system, the complex dynamics of this three-body interaction can eject that star right out of the globular cluster,” says Kyle Kremer, a new associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, San Diego, and a co-author of the paper.

Scientists suggest continue analyzing the celestial object using advanced tools such as infrared telescopes to determine the most likely scenario.

The object has another unique property. Data from the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaii, show that it has much less iron and other metals than other stars and brown dwarfs. This composition points to CWISE J1249. it’s quite oldand probably originates from one of the first generations of stars in our galaxy.

Citizen Science

An international group of volunteers, part of NASA’s Backworlds project, is working with interstellar image data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), a massive “all-sky” survey that was conducted between 2009 and 2011. It was reactivated between 2013 and 2024. It’s a citizen science project where non-scientists can analyze images over the internet to look for moving objects that could lead to exciting discoveries, allowing people of all backgrounds to take part in real scientific research, regardless of their training. So if you want to help discover the next space object, you can join Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 because Participation is open to anyone in any country in the world.

The telescope responsible for the images is NASA’s WISE spacecraft, short for Wide-angle infrared research survey, which scanned the sky in infrared light between 2009 and 2011, finding distant light sources by detecting their heat. However, it eventually ran out of frozen hydrogen, and the US space agency decided to put it into hibernation mode. Two years later, renamed to NEOWISEwas awakened and sent to work searching for potentially hazardous near-Earth objects such as asteroids and comets. Among the objects of study was also found its namesake, the comet NEOWISE.

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