A Trio Of ‘Citizen Scientists’ Discovered An Outrageously Fast Cosmic Object

When you look up at the familiar constellations in the night sky, it can be easy to underestimate the sheer size of our galaxy. And even though agencies like NASA employ a robust team of experts tasked with tracking the various celestial forces at work across the Milky Way, they can’t possibly record everything.

And that’s where so-called “citizen scientists” come in.

Introducing Backyard Worlds

Working with images provided by NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Explorer (or WISE) space mission, a group known as Backyard Worlds began scouring the cosmos about 15 years ago. And three of those citizen scientists discovered something they couldn’t believe hadn’t already been identified.

Martin Kabatnik, Thomas Bickle, and Dan Caselden said they noticed an object speeding across their feed and determined that it was roughly the size of a small star. But this thing was moving much faster than an ordinary star … about 1 million miles an hour, to be precise.

Kabatnik, Bickle, and Caselden have since written a report for Astrophysical Journal Letters regarding the unusual celestial body even as new details continue to emerge regarding what it actually is.

Compiling all the evidence

Based on the data that has already emerged, the common consensus is that the object should be classified as a brown dwarf, which describes something ranked between a gas giant planet and a star.

Such bodies aren’t uncommon, but no one has yet identified one traveling at such a high rate of speed on a course leading it out of the galaxy.

Now there’s a mounting effort to figure out how it gained its velocity, and the two leading hypotheses involve it either being thrown out of a binary system with a white dwarf star or being pulled out of a cluster during a close encounter with a black hole.

Chris Agee August 19th, 2024

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