A strange, hyper-fast object (more than 27,306 times the size of Earth) is traveling so fast through our galaxy that it could break free from the Milky Way, according to NASA.
Scientists determined that the mysterious object was traveling at a dizzying speed of one million miles per hour when they spotted it more than 400 light-years from Earth (one light-year equals six trillion miles).
Although experts have not determined what the new celestial body is, they speculated that it is a “brown dwarf,” a star that is larger than a planet but lacks the mass to sustain long-term nuclear fusion at its core like Earth’s sun.
If the object is confirmed to be a brown dwarf, it would be the first to be documented in a chaotic, hypervelocity orbit capable of breaking free from our home galaxy.
A strange, high-speed object (more than 27,306 times the size of Earth) is hurtling through our galaxy so fast that it could break away from the Milky Way, according to NASA. The fast-moving object (NASA artist image above, right) is estimated to be traveling at 1 million miles per hour.
A coalition of citizen scientists from NASA’s Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project were the first to spot the celestial body, the US space agency confirmed this week.
“I can’t describe the level of excitement,” said German citizen scientist Martin Kabatnik, a long-time member of NASA’s Backyard Worlds Programsaid in a statement.
“When I first saw how fast it was moving,” the Nuremberg investigator confessed, “I was convinced that it had already been reported.”
Backyard Worlds citizen scientists Martin Kabatnik, Thomas P. Bickle, and Dan Caselden were the first to spot this million-mile-per-hour object a few years ago, earning the hypervelocity object the cataloged name CWISE J124909.08+362116.0.
According to the astronomer Dr. Kyle Kremerwho has collaborated with them to better understand the object, several astrophysical theories could explain how the object, CWISE J1249 for short, could have reached its incredible speed.
In one theory, CWISE J1249 emerged from a binary or two-star system after its sister star, a “white dwarf,” died, collapsing in an explosive nuclear fusion reaction called a supernova.
Another viable theory holds that CWISE J1249 originated within a compact cluster of stars called a “globular cluster,” from which it was flung free by the pull of a black hole.
“When a star encounters a binary black hole system,” Dr. Kremer said in a NASA statement about the discovery, “the complex dynamics of this three-body interaction can eject that star out of the globular cluster.”
Volunteers for NASA’s “Backyard Worlds” project work with data from interstellar images taken by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), a massive “all-sky” survey conducted from 2009 to 2011 and again from 2013 to 2024. Above, the WISE telescope (artist’s concept)
Scans from NASA’s WISE telescope led to the discovery of thousands of minor planets in our galaxy and the first terrestrial “Trojan asteroid,” a rock that orbits the same ring around the Sun as our own planet. Above, a WISE mosaic of the “Heart and Soul Nebulae” about 6,000 light-years from Earth.
A series of university scholars and government scientists, including members of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, have written a report on the observations of these volunteer citizen scientists, pending peer review in Cornell arXiv place.
These experts, who include an astronomer from the University of Leicester and an astrophysicist from the American Museum of Natural History, have defended their own thesis that the object is an “L hypervelocity subdwarf”.
That would make it one of the smallest objects ever documented that can be classified as a brown dwarf.
The international group of volunteers behind NASA’s Backyard Worlds project is working with data from interstellar images taken by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), a massive all-sky survey conducted from 2009 to 2011 and again from 2013 to 2024.
Scans from NASA’s WISE telescope led to the discovery of thousands of minor planets in our galaxy, multiple star clusters and Earth’s first “Trojan asteroid” — a rock that orbits the same ring around the Sun as our own planet.
NASA hoped that the general public, like the Backyard Worlds team, would make even more discoveries with this huge amount of data from outer space.
Researchers tested 100 scenarios to see where CWISE J1249, a high-velocity system, might head next. The team found multiple scenarios (straight gray lines above) in which this L subdwarf is likely to be launched out of the Milky Way (the blue dotted circle is the boundary of our Milky Way).
According to NASA, scientists plan to use more equipment on CWISE J1249 in an effort to get a better idea of its chemical makeup, or “elemental composition.”
The chemistry of this high-velocity object could hold “clues as to which of these scenarios is more likely” – whether it was ejected by a black hole or a collapsing white dwarf, whether it is a gas giant or a flaming brown dwarf.
Using open source software to model galactic orbits of celestial bodies, called galpyThese researchers tested “100 random initial conditions” along with the identifying data they already knew about CWISE J1249 to see where it might go next.
As published in their paper on arXiv, which is awaiting peer review in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, the team found multiple scenarios in which this putative “L-hypervelocity subdwarf” is likely to be flung out of the Milky Way.
“Given the uncertainties in the inferred velocities and potential models,” the team wrote in their study, “we find that (WISE) J1249+3621 has a significant probability of not being bound to the Milky Way.”
“Seventeen percent of our simulated orbits are not constrained within a 10-gigayear period,” they added, meaning the object could be ejected into the unknown in about 10 billion years.