Cosmic Mystery Unveiled: Rapidly Moving Anomaly Detected in Space by Amateur Astronomers
Getting your hands dirty with galaxy-shattering discoveries isn't exclusively reserved for rocket scientists! All you really need is an internet connection, a bit of free time, and a passion for the stars.
That's all it took for Tom Bickle, Martin Kabatnik, and Austin Rothermich to find a celestial object zooming through the Milky Way, traveling at approximately one million miles (1.6 million kilometers) per hour. The trio were part of a unique crowdsourced venture called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, where volunteers sift through images captured by NASA's recently retired Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). The aim of this project is to identify objects on the edge of our solar system, such as brown dwarfs, low-mass stars, and even a hypothetical ninth planet orbiting the Sun.
The images received by the citizen scientists were processed from WISE's infrared cameras, which scan wavelengths of light we humans can't see with our naked eyes. These volunteers compared series of photos of the same objects taken about five years apart. This allowed them to filter out distant stars that weren't worth a second glance and also potential glitches from WISE's instruments.
While analyzing one such series, Bickle, Kabatnik, and Rothermich detected an object moving in the pictures. They reported their findings through the Backyard Worlds portal, and scientists followed up their finding by inspecting the object using the University of Hawaii's Near-Infrared Echellette Spectrometer telescope. It was given the name CWISE J1249.
A team of scientists from NASA, UC San Diego, and several other universities took a closer look at the data. According to their findings in an upcoming paper for the Astrophysical Journal Letters, CWISE J1249 could either be a small star or a brown dwarf. Whatever it is, it's moving incredibly fast, with a trajectory and speed that are quite unusual. Its speed suggests it will soon break free from the Milky Way and hurtle into intergalactic space.
The remarkable speed of CWISE J1249 isn't the only unique aspect. The data indicates it has less iron and other metals than observed stars and brown dwarfs, which could mean it's a very old object, dating back to the early days of the Milky Way.
Kabatnik, who lives in Nuremberg, Germany, shared his excitement about the discovery: "When I first saw how fast it was moving, I was convinced it must have been reported already."
Kyle Kremer, an incoming professor at UC San Diego, noted that CWISE J1249 might have been part of a binary system, but was catapulted away when its partner exploded in a supernova. Alternatively, it could have originated from a globular cluster but had a brush with a pair of black holes, launching it out of the cluster.
Despite not having the object named after them (at least, not yet), the three citizen scientists have earned themselves a place among the study's authors, securing some pretty snazzy bragging rights for their next work party. And who knows? Perhaps their names will one day grace the universe alongside the celestial body they helped discover.
[1] https://backyardworlds.voyage.nasa.gov/[3] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/citizen-scientists-have-discovered-a-suspected-new-solar-system-body/
- Tom Bickle, Martin Kabatnik, and Austin Rothermich, who were part of a crowdsourced venture called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, discovered an astronomical object moving quickly through the Milky Way using images captured by NASA's WISE satellite.
- The unique object, named CWISE J1249, was further studied using the University of Hawaii's Near-Infrared Echellette Spectrometer telescope, and scientists suggest it could be a small star or a brown dwarf.
- CWISE J1249's speed and composition indicate it could be very old, dating back to the early days of the Milky Way, and it's moving so fast that it will soon break free from the Milky Way and enter intergalactic space.
- As citizen scientists on the Backyard Worlds project, Bickle, Kabatnik, and Rothermich have earned their place among the study's authors, securing them some impressive bragging rights.
