A rogue, hyper-speed object — over 27,306 times the size of Earth — is hurtling so fast through our galaxy that it might break free of the Milky Way, according to NASA.
Scientists determined the mysterious object was cruising at a breakneck one million miles per hour when they spotted it more than 400 light years from Earth – one light-year is equal to six trillion miles.
While experts have not determined what the newfound celestial body is, they speculated it is a ‘brown dwarf,’ a star which is larger than a planet but lacks the mass to sustain long-term nuclear fusion in its core like Earth’s sun.
If the object confirmed as a brown dwarf, it would be first-ever to be documented in a chaotic, hyper-speed orbit capable of breaking free from our home galaxy.
A coalition of citizen-scientists with 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,’ German citizen-scientist Martin Kabatnik, a long-time member of NASA’s Backyard Worlds program, said in statement.
‘When I first saw how fast it was moving,’ the Nuremberg-based researcher confessed, ‘I was convinced it must have been reported already.’
Backyard Worlds citizen-scientists Martin Kabatnik, Thomas P. Bickle and Dan Caselden were the first to spot this million mph object a few years ago, earning the hyper-speed object the catalogued name CWISE J124909.08+362116.0.
According to astronomer Dr Kyle Kremer, who has collaborated with them on better understanding the object, several astrophysics theories could explain how the object, CWISE J1249 for short, could have gotten to its incredible speed.
In one theory, CWISE J1249 rocketed out of a two star or binary star system after its ‘white dwarf’ sister star died off — collapsing in an explosive runaway nuclear fusion reaction called a supernova.
Another viable theory has it that CWISE J1249 originated inside a tight cluster of starts called a ‘globular cluster’ where it was flung free via the pull of a black hole.
‘When a star encounters a black hole binary,’ Dr Kremer said in a NASA statement on the discovery, ‘the complex dynamics of this three-body interaction can toss that star right out of the globular cluster.’
