Backyard Worlds uses images from NASA’s WISE which mapped the sky in infrared light from 2009 to 2011.
New Delhi: A mysterious object speeding at 16,09,344 kmph in space has been spotted by a group of NASA’s citizen scientists. Scientists used images from NASA’s WISE, or Wide-field Infrared Explorer, mission, to spot the object. It has been named CWISE J1249 and it’s zooming out of the Milky Way galaxy. “I can’t describe…level of excitement,” one of the scientists said.
According to NASA, citizen scientists Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project have helped discover an object moving so fast that it will escape the Milky Way’s gravity and shoot 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.
Backyard Worlds 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 re-activated as NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) in 2013 and retired on Aug. 8, 2024.
“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 zooming out of the Milky Way at about 1 million miles per hour. But it also stands out for its low mass, which makes it difficult to classify as a celestial object. It could be a low-mass star, or if it doesn’t steadily fuse hydrogen in its core, it would be considered a brown dwarf, putting it somewhere between a gas giant planet and a star.
Scientists will look more closely at the elemental composition of CWISE J1249.
(Content credit: science.nasa.gov)