Amateur scientist discovers mysterious star-like object flying through space at 1,000,000 miles per hour
An amateur scientist has discovered a mysterious star-like object that’s flying through space at a million miles per hour.
The unknown item is whizzing by so quickly that it’s heading completely out of the Milky Way.
Three amateur scientists uncovered the strange object that’s hurtling through space after using images from a NASA telescope.
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It’s exciting news because it’s the first time anyone has discovered something this big traveling at such a fast speed.
In comparison, our solar system moves at an average speed of 450,000 mph.
One of the scientists, Martin Kabatnik, released a statement where he said: “I can’t describe the level of excitement.
“When I first saw how fast it was moving, I was convinced it must have been reported already.”
So, what actually is it?
The object is formally known as CWISE J1249 and while experts know that it isn’t a comet or asteroid, they believe that it could be a low-mass star or a brown dwarf.
But it might be something else entirely.
According to data sourced from the W.M. Keck Observatory, the object has much less iron and other metals that are usually found in stars and brown dwarfs, which means it could be very old.
In fact, it might be so ancient that it could be one of the first generations of stars from the beginning of our galaxy.
The three people who discovered it have now published a paper about the find in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
They found the object by using images that had been captured by NASA’s WISE spacecraft telescope and now other scientists are continuing to try to work out what the thing that’s flying through space could be.
Even more importantly than that, they are working to understand what happened to cause it to move so fast as they believe something major must have taken place to send the object hurtling so fast.
One theory is that it’s actually a part of a star that was sent flying when it exploded after running out of nuclear fuel.
Another theory is that it came from a globular cluster, which is a tightly bound cluster of tens of thousands to millions of stars.
If it encountered a pair of black holes, it could have sent a star out of the cluster, flying off into space.
Either way, the truth behind the strange object on its way to escape into intergalactic space is still a mystery for now.