Yasmeen Hamadeh
NASA citizen scientists have spotted a mysterious object moving at a hyper-speed rate through space that's left them baffled.
The object, which is estimated to be over 27,306 times the size of Earth, is apparently moving so fast through our galaxy that it could break out of the Milky Way.
The mysterious star-like object was spotted moving at a whopping million miles per hour more than 400 light years away from Earth.
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It was first identified by citizen scientists part of NASA's Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project.
While the identity of the object is yet to be determined, experts are speculating that it is a brown dwarf star which is typically larger than a planet but lacks the mass to sustain long-term nuclear fusion in its core like the Earth's sun.
If the mysterious object is in fact a brown dwarf star, it would be the first-ever documented case of a hyper-speed orbit capable of breaking from our galaxy.
"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 was joined by fellow citizen-scientists Thomas P. Bickle and Dan Caselden in the discovery. They've coined the object CWISE J124909.08+362116.0, or CWISE J1249 for short.
According to an astronomer who collaborated with them on understanding the potential brown dwarf, Dr. Kyle Kremer, there are several theories that could explain how CWISE J1249 is moving so fast.
One is that it catapulted out of a two star or binary star system after its white dwarf sister star collapsed in a nuclear fusion reaction known as a supernova.
Another theory sees that CWISE J1249 may have originated from a tight cluster of stars, called a globular cluster, where it broke free from the 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.
Members of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, academics, and government scientists are now drafting up a report on these observations that's still awaiting peer review from Cornell's arXiv site.
Across all boards, it so far seems that this object may be the first of its kind.