At about 1.6 million km/h: An unusual object is racing through our galaxy

At a speed of about 1.6 million km/h
An unusual object is hurtling through our galaxy.

By Kay Stoppel
August 27, 2024 at 2:44 PM

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Researchers are actually looking for a ninth planet in our solar system. They have come across another object that is moving through the galaxy at extremely high speeds. It can even escape the gravity of the Milky Way.

The researchers were actually pursuing an entirely different mystery, the solar system’s hypothesized and previously undiscovered ninth planet. However, they stumbled upon something strange: an object hurtling through our galaxy. Traveling at about 1.6 million kilometers per hour, it’s moving so fast that it could escape the Milky Way’s gravity and escape into intergalactic space, like the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Advertise.

The object was discovered by citizen scientists working on a NASA project. Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 Collaboration. This includes examining space images to locate Planet Nine, which is suspected to be at the edge of the solar system, or other nearby objects. The images examined come from NASA’s WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) mission, which mapped the sky in infrared light from 2009 to 2011.

“I can't describe how happy I am.”

A few years ago, three participants in the search discovered a faint, fast-moving object in the recordings, which they called CWISE J1249. One of the discoverers was Martin Kabatnik from Nuremberg. “I can’t describe how happy I am,” he said out loud. NASA Launch“When I first saw how fast it was moving, I was convinced it must have been reported.”

Telescope observations confirmed this discovery and helped to identify the fast-moving object in more detail. The high-speed object was described in a recent study as pre-print Available and appears in the professional journal “Astrophysical Journal Letters”.

unusual low mass

It's not just the object's high speed that's surprising, but its low mass as well. It could be a low-mass star or a brown dwarf, or something between a large gas planet and a star that never shines. It's the first high-velocity object ever discovered with a mass equal to or less than that of a small star. The very fast objects discovered so far — called hypervelocity objects — have typically been much larger stars.

This new object has another unique feature. Data from the Keck Observatory in Hawaii show that it contains much less iron and other metals than other stars and brown dwarfs. This unusual composition suggests that CWISE J1249 is very old and likely comes from one of the first generations of stars in our galaxy. At the same time, at just 400 light-years from our solar system, it is the closest supersonic runner to Earth known so far.

Did the supernova launch an object into space?

But why is this object moving so fast? There are different explanations for this. One says that CWISE J1249 originally came from a binary star system with a white dwarf that exploded as a supernova when it scooped up too much material from its companion. “In this type of supernova, the white dwarf is completely destroyed, so its companion is ejected and flies away at the speed of its original orbit, plus a little boost from the supernova explosion,” says Adam Burgasser, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the study’s first author.

Another possibility is that CWISE J1249 comes from a so-called globular cluster and was accidentally thrown into space with black holes. “When a star encounters a black hole, the complex dynamics of this interaction between the three objects can eject the star right out of the globular cluster,” said Kyle Cramer, an assistant professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at UC San Diego. The scientists now want to take a closer look at the elemental composition of CWISE J1249 to see which of these scenarios is most likely.