Use of images National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Using a telescope, three amateur scientists spotted a star-like object hurtling through space. space — so fast, in fact, that it would disappear from the Milky Way.
This natural wonder will be traveling at about one million miles per hour and escaping the grip of our galaxy — it’s the first time an object this massive has been spotted traveling at such incredible speeds.
“Words cannot describe how excited we are,” Martin Kabatnick, one of the discoverers, said in a statement. “When we first saw how fast it was moving, we were convinced it had already been reported.”
But what exactly is this?
Scientists have yet to discover a rocky exoplanet with air, but now they have a plan.
Scientists say CWISE J1249 could be a low-mass star or a brown dwarf, an object that’s neither a star nor a gas giant like Jupiter, but somewhere in between.
Credit: NASA illustration
it is Comet or asteroidScientists are wondering if it’s a low-mass star, Brown dwarfa celestial body that is not a star or a gas giant Jupiterbut something in between. Experts sometimes describe brown dwarfs as failed stars, which means they don’t have enough mass to produce their own nuclear energy.
Brown dwarfs aren’t all that rare, but this object, named CWISE J1249, is unusual in that it’s on its way to escaping into intergalactic space. And it has another odd feature: It has far less iron and other metals that are typically found in stars and brown dwarfs, according to data collected by the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. That’s because CWISE J1249 is so old. Among the first generation of stars Born in the galaxy.
Mashable Lightspeed
A citizen who made this discovery several years ago NASA’s Backyard World: Planet 9 The project includes Thomas P. Bickle and Dan Caselden. paper Published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Engineers assemble the WISE spacecraft in 2009 at the Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah.
Credit: SDL / NASA
The telescope that took this image was NASA’s WISE spacecraftShort for Extended Field Infrared Survey Orbiter, it scanned the sky at infrared wavelengths between 2009 and 2011, detecting distant sources of light by detecting heat. But the Earth-orbiting telescope ran out of supplies of frozen hydrogen needed to cool it, so NASA mothballed it.
Two years later, NASA revived the spacecraft and renamed it NEOWISE for the search for potentially hazardous near-Earth objects such as asteroids and comets. Over its lifespan, the telescope observed more than 44,000 celestial objects, including the one it was named after. Comet Neowise.
Despite its many accomplishments, NASA ended the mission last week because the spacecraft was too low in orbit to provide any more useful data.
Scientists will continue their study to determine whether CWISE J1249 is a brown dwarf or a low-mass star.
Credit: NASA / ESA / Illustration by Joseph Olmsted
The CWISE study of J1249 isn’t complete yet, and scientists will continue to search for clues about the root cause of its speed. After all, something big must have happened to send it hurtling through space at such a rapid pace. By comparison, Earth’s solar system moves at an average speed of 1000 km/h. 450,000 miles per hour.
One idea is that this object was once Binary star system and White dwarfIt is a small remnant of a star that ran out of nuclear fuel and exploded when it stripped excess material from its companion star.
Another theory is that it is Globular clusters It encountered two black holes, and the complex dynamics of such interactions can cause stars to break away from the group.
