Space & Astronomy

Huge mystery space object is traveling at a million miles per hour

By T.K. Randall
August 23, 2024 ·  2 comments

Image Credit: NASA / WM Keck Observatory / Adam Makarenko First picked up by a coalition of citizen-scientists with NASA's 'Backyard Worlds: Planet 9' project, the enormous object - which is 27,306 times the size of Earth - was situated around 400 light years away at the time of its detection while traveling at an incredible one million miles per hour.

"I can't describe the level of excitement," said citizen-scientist Martin Kabatnik.

"When I first saw how fast it was moving I was convinced it must have been reported already."

Scientists now believe that the object - designated CWISE J124909.08+362116 - could be a brown dwarf star, although it is unclear exactly how it ended up moving at such a speed.One theory is that this runaway brown dwarf might have been part of a binary star system and was propelled away at high speed when its companion collapsed into a supernova explosion.

Another possibility is that it was part of a globular cluster and was flung out into space by a black hole.

"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," said astronomer Dr Kyle Kremer.

Whatever the case, the star is traveling so fast that it could end up escaping the galaxy entirely.

This makes it the first brown dwarf of its kind ever observed.

Source: Mail Online | Comments (2)

Tags: Galaxy