NASA tracks mysterious object exiting the Milky Way
citizen scientists working with NASA's Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project has discovered a mysterious object, designated CWISE J124909.08+362116.0, speeding out of the Milky Way at about 1 million miles per hour. This object, detected in data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission, presents a unique challenge for classification due to its low mass and metallicity, suggesting it could be one of the oldest objects in our galaxy. This discovery underscores the significance of infrared astronomy and the valuable contributions of amateur astronomers to scientific research.
The discovery of CWISE J1249 was made by Martin Kabatnik, Thomas P. Bickle, and Dan Caselden, who were participating in the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project. The project utilizes data from NASA's WISE mission, which mapped the sky in infrared light from 2009 to 2011. The citizen scientists spotted a faint, fast-moving object in the WISE images.
Subsequent observations with several ground-based telescopes confirmed the object’s rapid movement. It is traveling at a speed of approximately 1 million miles per hour, which is so fast that it will eventually escape the Milky Way’s gravitational pull and enter intergalactic space.
CWISE J1249 presents a challenge for classification as its low mass makes it difficult to definitively categorize as either a star or a brown dwarf. Brown dwarfs are substellar objects that are too massive to be considered planets but are not massive enough to sustain hydrogen fusion in their cores like
