NASA announced a surprising discovery by citizen scientists. An object was observed traveling at an incredible speed of 1 million miles per hour. The object CWISE J124909.08+362116.0 is small from the Milky Way galaxy. The discovery was made through NASA’s Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project.
The Backyard Worlds project uses images from NASA’s WISE (Wide Field Infrared Explorer) mission. WISE used infrared light to image the sky from 2009 to 2011. It was reactivated in 2013 as NEOWISE and retired on March 8, 20241. The project will allow citizen scientists to analyze these images to aid detection other heavenly things
A few years ago, Martin Kabatnick and Thomas P. McCarthy wrote the book. Three dedicated citizen scientists, Bickley and Dan Keselden, detected a slow and fast moving object in the WISE images, dubbed CWISE J1249. Retrospective observations with ground-based telescopes confirmed the findings.
CWISE J1249 travels at about 1 million miles per hour. This speed is so great that it will eventually escape the gravitational pull of the Milky Way and collapse into cranial space. This results in a high speed factor. Even more intriguing is that this is the first superfast object that appears to be the size of an asteroid or less.
The low mass of an object makes it difficult to classify. Low-mass stars can be blue or dwarfs. Brown dwarfs are objects that are too massive to form a planet but too small to sustain hydrogen fusion like stars. Common brown dwarfs are rare. Backyard Worlds volunteers found more than 4,000 of them. However, none of the others are known to be moving out of the galaxy.
The CWISE J1249 also has a unique design. W. W. Maunakea, of Hawaii; This suggests that CWISE J1249 is quite old, possibly from one of the earliest generations of stars in our galaxy.
Why does CWISE J1249 go so fast?
One theory is that it comes from a two-component system in a white dwarf. A white dwarf is a small, dense star left over from a star similar to our sun. If the white shark absorbs enough material from its mate, it can explode as a supernova. This rocket can fire CWISE J1249 at high speed.
Another possibility is that it came from a bunch of coconuts. A globular cluster is a tightly packed cluster of stars. An accidental encounter with two black holes in the cluster could send CWISE J1249 flying.
The discovery of CWISE J1249 is a testament to the power of citizen science. Citizen scientists have an important role to play in helping professional astronomers make new discoveries. Martin Kabatnik, the citizen scientist who discovered CWISE J1249, expressed his interest. “I can’t explain the excitement,” he said. “When I first saw how fast it was going, I believed it would have been reported earlier.”
This finding also highlights the importance of the WISE and NEOWISE missions. These missions have provided a wealth of data that continues to yield new discoveries. Although NEOWISE will retire on March 8, 2024, scientists and citizen scientists will continue to analyze the data it collects.
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