If you’re a fan of space exploration, this is a story for you.
Cosmic Speed Demon Spotted Hurtling Through Space
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NASA has just spotted something truly mind-blowing – an object plowing through space at a speed of one million miles per hour. Yes, you did read that right – 1,000,000 mph. That’s the equivalent of traveling from New York to Los Angeles (about 2,450 miles) in less than 9 seconds.
A Cosmic Runaway
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Whatever it is isn’t zipping around aimlessly – this thing is moving so fast that it might actually fling itself right out of the Milky Way and off into the vast unknown of intergalactic space.
A Record-Breaking Discovery
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If that wasn’t crazy enough, if this object is confirmed it would be the first time we’ve ever seen something moving this fast with a mass similar to or smaller than a small star.
The Mystery Object
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Now, you might be wondering, what exactly is this mysterious space traveler? Well, that’s the million-dollar question. Scientists are scratching their heads trying to figure out if it’s a brown dwarf, a low-mass star, or something else entirely.
A Failed Star
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A brown dwarf is essentially a star that never quite made it to full stardom – it’s bigger than a planet but not big enough to sustain nuclear fusion like our Sun. If that’s what this object turns out to be, it will be the first ever discovered on a path that could blast it out of the Milky Way at such breakneck speed.
Citizen Scientists Make a Cosmic Discovery
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What’s even crazier is how this object, given the catchy nickname CWISE J124909.08+362116.0, was discovered. It wasn’t a team of seasoned NASA scientists who first spotted it, but a group of citizen scientists working on NASA’s Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project.
Backyard Worlds: Planet 9
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Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 is a citizen science project where everyday people help look for new space objects. It’s a collaboration between NASA, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and the University of Arizona – among others.
Amateur Astronomers Spot the Speedster
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These amateur astronomers noticed something moving unusually fast in the data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), and it’s been a whirlwind ever since. When they dug deeper, they found this speeding star bullet over 400 light-years away from Earth.
A Staggering Distance
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To put that in perspective, one light-year is about six trillion miles – so this thing is far, far away.
Stunned Citizen Scientists
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Martin Kabatnik, one of the citizen scientists who first noticed CWISE, said he was absolutely stunned when he saw how fast this object was moving. “I was convinced it must have been reported already,” he said in a statement released by NASA.
Citizen Scientists Turned Co-Authors
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He, along with Thomas P. Bickle and Dan Caselden, initially spotted the speeding object a few years ago, and now they’re credited as co-authors on a study about this discovery published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Not too bad for some hobby scientists!
Theories of Its Origin
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But how did this object get to be such a speed demon? Astronomers have a few wild theories. One idea is that it got kicked out of a binary star system – basically, two stars orbiting each other – after its companion white dwarf star went supernova. That kind of explosion could have sent this mystery object rocketing off into space.
Flung from Deepest Space
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Another possibility is that it started out in a dense cluster of stars called a globular cluster and got flung out at speed by a black hole.
Complex Dynamics
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Dr. Kyle Kremer, an astronomer involved in studying the object, explained in a NASA statement that “the complex dynamics of this three-body interaction can toss that star right out of the globular cluster.”
A Unique Chemical Makeup
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But here’s where it gets even more interesting. This object isn’t just speeding through space – it’s also got a unique chemical makeup.
Observations from the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii show that it has much less iron and other metals than most stars and brown dwarfs.
An Ancient Cosmic Relic
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This suggests that it’s incredibly old – maybe even from one of the first generations of stars in our galaxy. That means it could potentially date back to the early days of the Milky Way’s formation – over 13 billion years ago, according to science. Truly ancient.
A Team of Researchers Investigate
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Now, a whole crew of scientists and volunteers, including people from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and other top institutions, are digging into this find.
Simulating Its Future Path
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Researchers used a software called galpy to run simulations of where this object might be headed and found that there’s a big chance that it could eventually fling itself out of the Milky Way altogether.
A Prolonged Cosmic Exile
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Although, don’t be fooled; we won’t be seeing this happening anytime soon. Scientists reckon it will take around 10 billion years for CWISE to exit the Milky Way – so we’ll be waiting a long old while.
Unraveling the Mystery
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In the coming days, scientists plan to train more instruments on CWISE J1249 to figure out what it’s made of. This could reveal whether it’s more likely to be a gas giant or a burning brown dwarf and how it got its high-speed kick.
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