Backyard stargazers find object moving 1 million mph
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The Event Horizon Project on May 12, 2022, released the first image of at the Milky Way black hole Sagittarius A*. (Photo by EHT Collaboration/Twitter)
Aug. 15 (UPI) -- Backyard stargazers have discovered an object moving at more than a million mph through space, an interstellar phenomenon that typically takes the resources of high-tech observatories, the smartest scientists and high-dollar research to see, NASA announced Thursday.
Interstellar enthusiasts working on NASA's Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project helped discover an object moving so quickly that it will defy the Milky Way's gravity and jettison into intergalactic space.
"This hypervelocity object is the first such object found with the mass similar to or less than that of a small star," NASA said in a release about the discovery.
"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."
Kabatnik was part of the Backyard Worlds team, which uses images from NASA's WISE, or Wide Field Infrared Explorer, mission, which mapped the sky in infrared light from 2009 to 2011.
It was in analyzing this data that Kabatnik and other enthusiasts, Thomas P. Bickle, and Dan Caselden, located the object, known cryptically as CWISE J124909.08+362116.0, streaking faintly across the sky.
CWISE also stands out for its low mass, NASA said, making it difficult to classify as a celestial body and may best be described as a brown dwarf. Backyard Worlds teams have discovered as many as 4,000 of those, but none traveling so fast that it will slip the bonds of gravity and shoot into intergalactic space.
There are a few hypotheses as to why CWISE J1249 is traveling so fast. One is that it is the remnant of a white dwarf that exploded, and another is that it came from a group of stars called a globular cluster, and a chance meeting with a pair of black holes sent it soaring 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," Kyle Kremer, incoming assistant professor in UC San Diego's Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics said in the NASA release.
NASA and astronomers continue to seek backyard stargazers all over the world who want to volunteer to help in efforts to discover similar wonders in the future.
Scientists have also relied on backyard researchers to help battle the effects of climate change.
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