Citizen scientists discover object soaring out of the galaxy

( NewsNation ) — Citizen scientists say they have discovered a fast-moving object on a trajectory to escape the Milky Way and shoot into intergalactic space.

The citizen scientists used data from NASA’s WISE telescope to discover the object, which is moving at about 1 millions miles per hour. That’s fast enough that it will be able to escape the galaxy’s gravity. It’s the first such object discovered to have the mass of a small star.

Martin Kabatnik, Thomas P. Bickle and Dan Caselden are credited with finding the faint object, known as CWISE J124909.08+362116.0 (we’ll call it CWISE for short) in the WISE images. They followed up using several ground-based telescopes to confirm the discovery and co-authored a paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“I can’t describe the level of excitement,” said Kabatnik in a NASA article . “When I first saw how fast it was moving, I was convinced it must have been reported already.”

Scientists are still working to determine exactly what the object is. It could possibly be a low-mass star or a brown dwarf, which is somewhere between a gas giant planet and a star, NASA explains.

Data from the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii seems to indicate CWISE has less iron and metals than other objects like it, making it even more mysterious. Its makeup suggests it could be not only fast but also very old, NASA says.

It’s also not entirely clear why CWISE is moving so fast. Scientists are hoping that taking a closer look at CWISE’s elemental composition will help narrow down the answer.

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