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’s all it took for Tom Bickle, Martin Kabatnik and Austin Rothermich to find an object traveling through the Milky Way at about 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) per hour. The trio are participants in the online collaborative project “Backyard World: Planet 9,” in which volunteers view images captured 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 large to be planets but too small to be stars), low-mass stars, and even a hypothetical ninth planet orbiting the sun.
The photos sent to citizen scientists are actually processed by WISE’s infrared camera, which scans wavelengths of light invisible to the human eye. Volunteers analyzed a series of photos of the same object taken about five years apart, which allowed them to filter out stars too far away to be of interest, as well as potential malfunctions of the WISE instruments.
In one such series, Bickel, Kabatnik, and Rotherich noticed an object moving in the image. They reported their findings through the Backyard World portal. Scientists followed up their discovery by observing the object through the University of Hawaii’s Near-Infrared Echelle Spectrograph telescope, and named it CWISE J1249.
A team of scientists from NASA, the University of California, San Diego, and several other universities began examining the data. In preprint papers accepted for publication Astrophysical Journal Lettersthey wrote that while it’s unclear exactly what CWISE J1249 is, its characteristics make it likely that it is a small star or a brown dwarf. Whatever it is, it’s moving quickly, with what the researchers call a “unique trajectory and speed.” So fast, it appears it will eventually escape the Milky Way’s gravity and shoot into intergalactic space.
It’s not just the speed that’s unusual. The data suggest that CWISE J1249 contains less iron and other metals than other observed stars and brown dwarfs, which could mean it is a very old object, dating to the early days of the Milky Way.
“I can’t describe how excited I am,” Kabanik, who lives in Nuremberg, Germany, said in a statement. “When I first saw how fast it was moving, I was convinced it must have been reported.”
As for why this object is moving so fast, incoming UC San Diego professor Kyle Kremer explains that it could be part of a binary star system, but when its partner goes supernova, it Being ejected. Another explanation is that it was originally part of a globular cluster (a collection of large numbers of stars), but had a close encounter with a pair of black holes, whose “complex dynamics” “could have ejected the stars from the globular cluster.”
The three citizen scientists appear to have been unfairly treated, as the object is not named after them (at least not yet). Don’t feel too bad. The trio is listed as one of the study’s authors, so they have some pretty cool bragging rights at your next work Christmas party.
