Citizen Scientists Spot Strange Object Moving at Incredible Speed ​​Through the Universe

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to make important astronomical discoveries. Sometimes, all it takes is an internet connection and some free time.

That was all Tom Bickle, Martin Kabatnik and Austin Rothermich needed to find a celestial body hurtling through the Milky Way at a blistering speed of about 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) per hour. The trio were participants in Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, an online program. cooperation Volunteers are looking at images taken by NASA’s recently retired Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). The goal is to identify objects at the edge of the solar system, such as brown dwarfs (balls of gas too big to be planets but too small to be stars), low-mass stars, and even a hypothetical ninth planet orbiting the sun.

In fact, the images sent to citizen scientists were processed by WISE’s infrared cameras, which scan wavelengths of light invisible to the human eye. The volunteers analyzed a series of images of the same objects taken about five years apart, which allowed them to filter out stars that were too distant to interest them, as well as potential malfunctions of WISE’s instruments.

In one of these sequences, Pickel, Kabatnik, and Rothermich noticed an object moving in the images. They reported their findings through the Backyard Worlds portal. The scientists followed up their discovery by looking at the object through the University of Hawaii’s Near Infrared Spectrometer, which they named CWISE J1249.

A team of scientists from NASA, the University of California, San Diego, and several other universities set out to examine the data. In a pre-print version, paper It has been accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal LettersWhile it’s not clear what CWISE J1249 actually is, its properties make it likely to be either a young star or a brown dwarf, the researchers wrote. Whatever it is, it’s moving fast, with what the researchers called a “unique trajectory and velocity.” It appears to be so fast that it will eventually break free from the Milky Way’s gravitational pull and be launched into intergalactic space.

It’s not just speed. The data suggests that CWISE J1249 contains less iron and other metals than other stars and brown dwarfs that have been observed, which could mean it’s a very old object, dating back to the early days of the Milky Way.

“I can’t describe the level of excitement,” said Kabatnik, who lives in Nuremberg, Germany, in statement“When I first saw how fast it was moving, I was convinced it must have been reported already.”

As for why the object was moving so fast, Kyle Cramer, a new professor at the University of California, San Diego, who worked on the research, said it may have been part of a binary system, but was flung outward when its partner went supernova. Another explanation is that it started out as part of a globular cluster (a large group of stars), but was too close to a pair of black holes, whose “complex dynamics” could have “kicked this star right out of the globular cluster.”

It may seem like the three citizen scientists have been treated badly, since the object hasn’t been named after them (at least not yet). Don’t feel bad. The trio are listed as co-authors of the study, so they have some serious bragging rights at their work’s upcoming birthday party.