Nasa Citizen Scientists Spot Object Moving One Million Miles Per Hour
They utilized data from NASA’s WISE telescope, which subsequently became the NEOWISE mission, to find the dim, fast-moving object speeding out of the Milky Way.
The Milky Way’s most familiar stars circle quietly in its core. However, citizen scientists working on NASA’s Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project have assisted in the discovery of an object moving so quickly that it will leave the Milky Way’s gravity and travel into intergalactic space. This is the first hypervelocity object discovered with the mass of a tiny star.
Backyard Worlds incorporates photos from NASA’s WISE, or Wide Field Infrared Explorer, mission, which scanned the sky in infrared light from 2009 to 2011. It was reactivated as NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) in 2013 and is scheduled to be deactivated on August 8, 2024.
Longtime Backyard Worlds citizen scientists Martin Kabatnik, Thomas P. Bickle, and Dan Caselden discovered CWISE J124909.08+362116.0 in WISE pictures a few years ago. Follow-up observations with various ground-based telescopes enabled scientists to confirm the discovery and characterize the object. These citizen scientists are now co-authors on the team’s research on this discovery, which has been published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters (pre-print version accessible here).
“I can’t describe the level of excitement,” said Kabatnik, a citizen scientist from Nuremberg, Germany. “When I first saw how fast it was moving, I was convinced it must have been reported already.”
CWISE J1249 is speeding out of the Milky Way at around 1 million mph. However, it stands out for its low mass, making it difficult to categorize as a celestial object. It might be a low-mass star, or if it does not consistently fuse hydrogen in its core, it would be classified as a brown dwarf, falling in between a gas giant planet and a star.
Ordinary brown dwarfs are not extremely rare. Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 volunteers have discovered nearly 4,000 of them! However, none of the others are known to be leaving the galaxy.
This new thing has yet another distinguishing feature. Data from the W. M. Keck Observatory in Maunakea, Hawaii, demonstrate that it has significantly less iron and other metals than other stars and brown dwarfs. This odd composition indicates that CWISE J1249 is exceedingly old, most likely from one of our galaxy’s early generations of stars.
Why is this item moving at such high speeds? One idea is that CWISE J1249 originated in a binary system with a white dwarf, which burst as a supernova after removing too much material from its companion. Another idea is that it came from a densely packed collection of stars known as a globular cluster, and a chance encounter with a pair of black holes blew it away.
“When a star encounters a black hole binary, the complex dynamics of this three-body interaction can toss that star right out of the globular cluster,” explains Kyle Kremer, an incoming assistant professor at UC San Diego’s Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Scientists will investigate the elemental makeup of CWISE J1249 to determine which of these scenarios is more likely.
This finding wasthe result of a collaborative effort on numerous levels, involving volunteers, experts, and students. Kabatnik thanks other citizen scientists for assisting him in his quest, notably Melina Thévenot, who “blew my mind with her personal blog about doing searches using Astronomical Data Query Language,” he added. Frank Kiwy, a citizen scientist, wrote software that contributed to this discovery, he said.
Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 scientific team member Adam Burgasser, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, leads the study, which also features co-authors Hunter Brooks and Austin Rothermich, astronomy students who started their careers as citizen scientists.
Become a citizen scientist
Do you want to help discover the next spectacular space object? Join Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 now; anyone from any country can participate.
Podcast
Check out this NASA’s Curious Universe audio episode to hear personal experiences from citizen scientists working on NASA-related projects.
