Use an image of a NASA Three amateur scientists spotted a star-like object hurtling through their telescopes space — so fast, in fact, that it would roar out of the galaxy.
This monster of nature, traveling at approximately 1 million miles per hour, will escape the clutches of the Milky Way. This is the first time anyone has discovered something so huge at such an incredible speed.
“I can’t describe my excitement,” co-discoverer Martin Kabatnik said in a statement. “When I first saw how fast it was moving, I was convinced it must have been reported.”
But what exactly is this thing?
Scientists have yet to discover a rocky exoplanet with air. But now they have a plan.
Scientists say CWISE J1249 may be a low-mass star or brown dwarf, an object that is not quite a star or a gas giant like Jupiter, but something in between.
Image source: NASA Illustration
this is not a comet or asteroid. Scientists say it could be a low-mass star or a brown dwarfan object that is not quite a star or a gas giant planet Jupiterbut somewhere in between. Experts sometimes describe brown dwarfs as failed stars: not massive enough to generate their own nuclear energy.
While brown dwarfs are not uncommon, this object, known as CWISE J1249, is unusual because it is about to escape into intergalactic space. It also has another strange feature: The object has much less iron and other metals typically found in stars and brown dwarfs, according to data collected by the WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii, suggesting that CWISE J1249 is so old that it may yes among the first generation of stars Born in the Milky Way.
Mix and match speed of light
The citizen who made the discovery a few years ago NASA’s Backyard World: Planet Nine project, including Thomas P. Bickle and Dan Caselden, has just become piece of paper Posted in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
In 2009, engineers assembled the WISE spacecraft at the Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah.
Image credit: SDL/NASA
The telescope responsible for the image is NASA’s WISE spacecraftabbreviation for wide-field infrared measurement detector. It scanned the sky in infrared wavelengths between 2009 and 2011, looking for distant light sources by sensing heat. But the Earth-orbiting telescope ran out of supplies of frozen hydrogen that kept it cool, so the space agency put it into hibernation.
Two years later, NASA resurrected the spacecraft, renamed NEOWISE, to search for potentially hazardous near-Earth objects such as asteroids and comets. Throughout its lifetime, the telescope studied more than 44,000 objects, including its namesake, Comet Neowisdom.
Despite its many achievements, NASA terminated the mission last week because the spacecraft would soon be too low in its orbit to provide any more useful data.
Scientists will continue to study CWISE J1249, trying to discern whether it is a brown dwarf or a low-mass star.
Image credit: NASA/ESA/Illustration by Joseph Olmsted
Work on CWISE J1249 is not yet complete. Scientists continue to search for clues as to the root cause of its speed. After all, something big must have happened to send it hurtling across the universe. In comparison, the average moving speed of the Earth’s solar system is 450,000 mph.
One idea is that the object was once binary star system and a white dwarf starIt is the tiny remnant of a star that ran out of nuclear fuel and exploded when it took too much material from its companion star.
Another idea is that it comes from a close-knit group of stars called globular cluster Encountered a pair of black holes. The complex dynamics of this interaction can set a star apart from the crowd.
